National Coming Out Day

I didn't get around to posting on Monday, Columbus Day, and I have something I'd like to post about that, but before I do there's something going on tomorrow that I'd like to alert people about.

Tomorrow (Oct 11, 2007) is National Coming Out Day and the twenty year anniversary of the National March on Washington for Lesbian and Gay Rights, accompanied by the AIDs Quilt's first display. The AIDs Quilt is a giant memorial to individuals who have AIDs/HIV or have died from it. In addition to being a memorial, the Quilt is also used to raise money for AIDs service organizations.

This year for National Coming Out Day, the Human Rights Campaign (HRC) is inviting LGBT (lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgendered) people to make videos about coming out and straight people to make videos about being inspired by others coming out. You can check out their website to watch their introductory video and to get information about how to make a video. Also, please check out their Getting Involved/Take Action tab for some information about the HRC's current advocacy campaigns.

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On to (or back to) Columbus Day:

Howard Zinn tell us that when Columbus landed in the Bahamas, he was

met by the Arawark Indians, who swam out to greet them. The Arawark lived in village communes, had developed agriculture of corn, yams, cassava. They could spin and weave, but they had no horses or work animals. They had no iron, but they wore tiny gold ornaments in their ears.
This was to have enormous consequence: it led to Columbus to take some of them aboard ship as prisoners because he insisted that they guide him to the source of the gold."

These were just the first of Columbus' prisoners. According to Zinn, when Columbus realized that there was not as much gold in America as he had originally presumed and that he would have to send some merchandise back home he and his men

went on a great slave raid, rounded up fifteen hundred Arawak men, women, and children, put them in pens guarded by Spanairds and dogs, then picked the five hundred best specimens to load onto ships. Of those five hundred, two hundred died en route."

Zinn goes on to say

My point is not that we must, in telling history, accuse, judge, condemn Columbus in absentia. It is too late for that; it would be a useless scholarly exercise in morality. But the easy acceptance of atrocities as a deplorable but necessary price to pay for progress...that is still with us. One reason these atrocities are still with us is that we have learned to bury them in a mass of other facts, as radioactive wastes are buried in containers in the earth."

For some interesting history about the Monacan tribe of Native Americans, who Thomas Jefferson once saw passing through Monticello to visit a burial ground of their ancestors, please check this out.

I can't think, the TV is on

Lately I've been feeling way too wired into television and the internet. For me, it's akin to feeling full or even like a glutton after a huge (unhealthy) meal. I have several websites that I check multiple times a day throughout the day everyday. And now, with the fall television season starting up again, I've been spending a lot of time letting my eyes glaze over as I practically slump over on the couch in front of the t.v. I am one of those people who cannot watch tv and carrying on a conversation at the same time; I get completely engrossed in whatever is on. I guess it's all those bright and shiny colors flying by me at a fast rate.

I watched Heroes last season and I'm going to continue to watch it again.

Spoiler alert **if you haven't watched the first season of Heroes and want to stop reading now, even though I'm only going to talk about it in a general way**

Last season focused good battling the evil of "progress at any cost." The Company was willing to sacrifice the lives of most of the people in New York City in order to unite the country under Nathan, ushering in a new era of progress and prosperity. Because the cost of the Company's idea of progress was millions (thousands?) of deaths through a nuclear explosion (in New York City), I initially thought that the show was trying to say something about terrorism. But I think that there is something else there, namely I think the Company represented the ideas of Social Darwinism*, (the concept that the rule "survival of the fittest" applies in economic and social situations).

On an individual level it's easy to see that, Social Darwinism is ridiculous; it requires us to consider a man who had the happy accident to be born into a wealthy family morally superior or more deserving of his wealth than a man who was born into poverty (it also requires us to think that the man born into poverty deserves to be poor). But I think that Social Darwinism lives on in some of our business practices. More and more companies are turning to global outsourcing as a means of cutting expenses. It is cheaper to make products in foreign countries that have less strict (or no) environmental or labor regulations. Those cheap costs of production are then (somewhat) reflected in lower costs to the United States consumer.

How can it be fair to pay someone with the same skill sets as an American worker less money just because they are born in a foreign country? I know there are complicated reasons why less money is seen as acceptable in these cases, but is one of those reasons based on a Social Darwinian idea? That those who work hard enough, no matter where they start, can and will achieve wealth and therefore, people who are poor are poor because they did not work hard enough (and do not deserve equal treatment)?

If progress in this case is cheaper goods for American consumers then the cost might be companies must engage in unethical business practices. Are we asking ourselves if progress is worth the cost? I know they are in academia, but is this question being asked by business leaders? Is it being asked by consumers? How can consumers even ask if progress is worth the cost if they don't even know what the ethical costs are? Is it the consumers job to stay informed about global business practices of the companies they use? Or is it the government's job to prevent unethical global business practices to begin with?

I honestly do not know if global outsourcing has a net positive or negative effect on foreign countries. I have heard arguments from Americans on both sides. I would like to hear from the foreign workers as well, because I don't want to be Whitey McPriviledged spouting my opinion about what's best for other countries. I do think, however, there are clearly some costs to global outsourcing.

I'm leaving this entry the scattered mess it is. I don't really know enough about this stuff to be writing about it, and clearly I have more questions then answer. If anyone has any good books/links in regards to globalization that they'd like to share, please do.




*A note about Social Darwinism: the theory of evolution defines success by a species ability to adapt to a given situation; the ability to adapt is measured first by the number of offspring a species successfully raises to reproduce and secondly, the number of new species that spring from the original species. Social Darwinism, on the other hand, measures success in terms of wealth acquired and the idea of "progress and civilization." One of the reasons that Darwin's theory of evolution was so threatening at the time he wrote his books is because there is no "progress" in Darwin's evolution; there is no end goal, there is only randomness. In college I took a class called Origins of Contemporary Thought where Allan Megill argued that this was Darwin's real challenge to religion; a world that works without an end goal, without progressing, implies that there is no God.

On their backs

I worked nine hours today, which is about average for me. For some reason today felt particularly long, but then, while I was waiting for the trolley this evening I was reading "A People's History of the United States" and I came across this,

1835, twenty mills went on strike to reduce the workday from thirteen and a half hours to eleven hours, to get cash wages instead of company scrip, and to end fines for lateness. Fifteen hundred children and parents went out on strike, and it lasted six weeks. Strikebreakers were brought in, and some workers went back to work, but the strikers did win a twelve-hour day and nine hours on Saturday.

And then later,

A three-month strike of 100,00 workers in New York won the eight-hour day, and at a victory celebration in June 1872, 150,000 workers paraded through the city.

So that nine-hour day that wore me down today? That was bought on the backs of strikers, who sometimes gave their lives when militia were brought in to break up strikes in the 1870s. All of the things I enjoy in my working life; a lunch break, a paycheck instead of coupons at the company store, health insurance, workman's comp should I be injured on the job, sanitary and physically comfortable working conditions, were fought for at the ballet box and on the streets.

Zinn also writes,

...[After the Civil War] political elites of North and South would take hold of the country and organize the greatest march of economic growth in human history. They would do it with the aid of, and at the expensive of, black labor, white labor, Chinese labor, European immigrant labor, female labor, rewarding them differently by race, sex, national origin, and social class, in such a way as to create separate levels of oppression

I think much the same is going on today, a wealthy few is exploiting many, with separate levels of oppression being used "to stabilize the pyramid of wealth," but I also think it's important to recognize the backs we are standing on, as we continue to push against the classist, racist, sexist, and xenophobic forces that are expressed in our country's working life.

France Wright, an Early American Feminist

For my birthday this year Jake gave me Howard Zinn's "A People's History of the United States, 1492-Present" (Lauren's recommendation).

In the first chapter of the book Zinn writes,

...this book will be skeptical of governments and their attempts, through politics and culture, to ensnare ordinary people in a giant web of nationhood pretending to a common interest. I will try not to overlook the cruelties that victims inflict on one another as they are jammed together in the boxcars of the system. I don't want to romanticize them. But I do remember (in rough paraphrase) a statement I once read: "The cry of the poor is not always just, but if you don't listen to it, you will never know what justice is."

I really can't recommend this book highly enough. Zinn's writing is intelligent and engaging and I feel as though I learn something new each time I pick it up.

For example, in his chapter "The Other Civil War," Zinn mentions Frances Wright "an early feminist and utopian socialist," who, according to Zinn, addressed Philadelphia labor unions on July 4th, 1829.

Wright was an advocate for "socialism, the abolition of slavery, universal suffrage, free secular education, birth control, changes in the marriage and divorce laws." In 1858 Ernestine L. Rose described Wright as "the first woman in this country who spoke on the equality of the sexes." (My source for this info is here.)

Wright is probably the most famous for attempting to establish a utopian society, made up of slaves she bought and then freed and whites, called Nashoba. (The community was founded in 1826 and fell apart four years later.) Wright believed that free love (if you get what I'm saying) was one solution to racism. Nashoba's ultimate failure was a result of financial mismanagement, but, in a way, it was a failure from it's inception. Whites still held the power in the community in the form of a board of trustees and overseers. Please check this out for a brief critique of Nashoba.

As a woman who went to college, I want to recognize that I would not have been able to get a secondary eduction, let along a college education, were it not for Wright and other activist like her pushing for universal equal opportunity for education.

In 1829 Wright said,

Your political institutions have taken equality for their basis; your declaration of rights, upon which your institutions rest, sets forth this principle as vital and inviolate. Equality is the soul of liberty; there is, in fact, no liberty without it.

How are men to be secured in any rights without instruction; how to be secured in the equal exercise of those rights without equality of instruction? By instruction understand me to mean knowledge - just knowledge; not talent, not genius, not inventive mental powers. These will vary in every human being; but knowledge is the same for every mind, and every mind may and ought to be trained to receive it. If then, ye have pledged, at each anniversary of your political independence, your lives, properties, and honor, to the securing of your common liberties, ye have pledged your lives, properties, and honor, to the securing of your common instruction.

All men are born free and equal! That is: our moral feelings acknowledge it to be just and proper, that we respect those liberties in others, which we lay claim to for ourselves; and that we permit the free agency of every individual, to any extent which violates not the free agency of his fellow creatures.

I'm so glad I don't live in medieval times

After remembering that I owe her a thank-you card for a birthday present, I started thinking about my maternal Grandmother (Grandma B) this afternoon. She and I started writing letters to each other on a regular basis about a year ago. When my paternal Grandmother and my maternal Grandfather died, I realized that I had a lot of questions I wanted to ask them that I never got to.

My Grandma B has told me a lot about her life in the past year, from the general details to her feelings at the times of some of the historical events that have taken place in her lifetime. She has lead a very interesting life. She recently wrote to me that her children are the most important thing in her life, which has got me thinking about my Grandmother and reproduction (er, not specifically, more generally: Women who were born in the 1920s and reproduction). My Grandmother was a practicing Catholic throughout her marriage to my Grandfather (and remains so today). She was pregnant nine times, had two miscarriages, and seven children. Because of her Catholicism and the number of times she was pregnant, I assume she practiced the rhythm method, but I was interested to find out what other methods of contraceptives were available during her lifetime.

Check this out for (as far as I can tell) a comprehensive look at the history of contraceptives, including information on how contraceptives have been used in the past in forced sterilization/forced population control efforts. (I would be remiss if I didn't mention the darkside of contraceptives' history.)

Here's some of the interesting stuff I ran into tonight while looking into the history of contraceptives. (All of the info comes from the above Planned Parenthood site, unless otherwise noted.)

The Condom - Using a new manufacturing process known as "dipping" (which as far as I can tell means dipping glass dildos into hot latex), the modern day latex condom was created in the 1920s. Before that they were rubber and had a large seam down the side (source).

The Diaphragm - Lemon halves may have been the modern diaphragm's medieval predecessor (source). In 1915 Margaret Sanger visited a Dutch Birth Control clinical and brought back with her their idea for a flexible diaphragm that was fitted by medical staff (source and also just a cool link about Sanger).

The Intrauterine Device (IUD) - IUDs have returned to the market and are considered safe, after a serious scare in the 1970s with the Dalkon Shield. (Speaking of the darkside of contraceptive history, the Dalkon Shield was dumped at a reduced price onto third world countries just before it was removed from the market in the U.S.)

Vasectomy -- In 1916 until 1940 (when the procedure for this purpose was discredited), a doctor began performing vasectomies to reduce the production of hormones that cause aging.

Birth Control Pills - In 1965, the Supreme court struck down a law banning prescribing, selling, and using contraceptives in Griswold v. Connecticut. The court held that there is right to privacy "created by several fundamental constitutional guarantees." (That whole right to privacy thing would come up again...)

Check out that main Planned Parenthood link above if you have time. There's a lot of really great info there.