wrapping up

Finals are around the corner and we’ve all got other things to worry about, so it looks like the blogs will be shutting down after Thanksgiving. I may stick around here a little while longer, but soon I will return to my old home at http://genelewis.wordpress.com/ (now with a brand new design!).

As The Hub’s first bloggers, I hope we’ve launched something that will grow and improve in years to come. I think we’ve featured quite a few interesting, sometimes fantastic posts all semester.

However, one flaw that I’ve felt from very early on is that our voices have been limited. A while ago Meredith passed on an e-mail from the campus Republicans criticizing the balance of the Daily’s coverage. Now, I don’t expect that a political advocacy group will ever be completely happy with the local mainstream media; it’s their job to push from the margins and shift the debate, in ways that are often unfair to those trying to fairly and accurately report the news.

In other words, despite their rhetoric, most advocates do not actually want fair media; they just want the bias to be more on their side.

But even so, I could not help but agree with some of the Republicans’ criticisms. And if they read me, Meredith, Tiara, and Tres, I’m sure we’ve only provided them more ammo. It’s fairly easy to recognize us as the nest of liberal conspiracists that we are (Dane, as a sports guy, is at least immune from this critique, though on this campus talking football is probably even more dangerous than talking politics.)

Now, I don’t think we should temper our opinions to appease some imagined ideal of balance. That would be dishonest, and, perhaps even worse, result in less interesting writing. Nor do I think we must have a house Republican to insert right-wing talking points on every issue we discuss. Political balance may not even be the right way to look at it, since there are so many other voices out there that don’t fit into the cages of left-right, liberal-conservative, Democrat-Republican.

Heck, we could improve diversity just by looking outside the journalism school. I’m sure there are many fascinating voices working in the fine arts or hard sciences that would provide a genuinely different take on campus life than those of us who live or have at some point lived inside the Daily newsroom.

Ideally, new voices would not just provide the opposite perspective on the same old topics, but point out other issues that we may not even have considered worth looking at.

But that will be a project for editors of later years. In any case, after an admittedly shaky start, The Hub Web site has improved greatly and is getting better all the time.

Besides, as a student newspaper, we’re all learning. Hopefully the lessons of The Hub have helped form some of the great new media minds in the next generation of journalists.

Anyway, it’s been fun. Thanks so much for reading.

Photo by Flickr user Krista76 used under a Creative Commons license.

it’s Paul Simon Sunday

re: affirmative action

I have to respectfully disagree with Tiara on affirmative action. Especially this bit:

And how can a white man who has been provided every opportunity in the world honestly say, just because he has a higher GPA or test scores, that he is more deserving than a racial minority or woman who has been denied the same opportunities to achieve his qualifications?

Will we let the resistance of white males to affirmative action renegotiate antidiscrimination law so that efforts to combat discrimination are now discriminatory?

Frankly, the world is still a mighty friendly place for a white guy and to sign this petition is a spit in the face of people who continue to be repressed.

The world does not divide so neatly into white men (privileged) and everyone else (oppressed). And Tiara knows this. She has written too eloquently and sincerely on the plight of poor people in our society to think that being a white guy means you automatically have every opportunity.

She is correct that the lack of outrage against preferential treatment given to children of alumni puts in question the motivations of those who most vehemently oppose affirmative action. However, that doesn’t mean affirmative action itself is the best policy.

Continuing discrimination in America is real, but we shouldn’t ignore that we’ve made great progress since the 60s, 70s, and 80s. At the same time, and especially in the last decade, wealth and income inequality has hugely increased, giving all but the very richest a smaller share of the pie.

We also shouldn’t scapegoat minorities for the problems facing all of us. However, when people’s livelihood and dreams are being squeezed, a backlash against any perceived unfairness is inevitable.

I’m not convinced that affirmative action is the way out of this predicament. No matter what you think of the objections on the merits, it is divisive, and much of the same goal can be achieved by creating more opportunities for anyone escaping from poverty, regardless of race. At a time when all people interested in a more equal society should be banding together to insist on universal health care, a fairer tax system, and better assistance for the poor of all races, affirmative action may be trapping us in the battles of yesterday.

Photo: A Matter of Black and White: The Autobiography of Ada Lois Sipuel Fisher (1996)

interfaith dialogue of the day, part VIII

Japanese lunar orbiter Kaguya captures the first HD images of the Earth rising and setting over the moon’s horizon:

Some famous words by Carl Sagan come to mind:

Look again at that dot. That’s here. That’s home. That’s us. On it everyone you love, everyone you know, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever was, lived out their lives. The aggregate of our joy and suffering, thousands of confident religions, ideologies, and economic doctrines, every hunter and forager, every hero and coward, every creator and destroyer of civilization, every king and peasant, every young couple in love, every mother and father, hopeful child, inventor and explorer, every teacher of morals, every corrupt politician, every “superstar,” every “supreme leader,” every saint and sinner in the history of our species lived there-on a mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam.

The Earth is a very small stage in a vast cosmic arena. Think of the rivers of blood spilled by all those generals and emperors so that, in glory and triumph, they could become the momentary masters of a fraction of a dot. Think of the endless cruelties visited by the inhabitants of one corner of this pixel on the scarcely distinguishable inhabitants of some other corner, how frequent their misunderstandings, how eager they are to kill one another, how fervent their hatreds.

Our posturings, our imagined self-importance, the delusion that we have some privileged position in the Universe, are challenged by this point of pale light. Our planet is a lonely speck in the great enveloping cosmic dark. In our obscurity, in all this vastness, there is no hint that help will come from elsewhere to save us from ourselves.

The Earth is the only world known so far to harbor life. There is nowhere else, at least in the near future, to which our species could migrate. Visit, yes. Settle, not yet. Like it or not, for the moment the Earth is where we make our stand.

It has been said that astronomy is a humbling and character-building experience. There is perhaps no better demonstration of the folly of human conceits than this distant image of our tiny world. To me, it underscores our responsibility to deal more kindly with one another, and to preserve and cherish the pale blue dot, the only home we’ve ever known.

health insurance is for the healthy

For me, the debate about government supplied universal health care begins and ends with this: health insurance companies may be very efficient businesses. The problem is, what they are efficient at is not providing health care to those who need it. Their business model depends on taking as much of our money as possible while paying as few of our medical expenses as they can. Hence we get some horrible, soulless person working as a “senior cancellation specialist”:

Patsy Bates is a self-employed hairdresser who was in the middle of cancer treatment when Health Net, one of California’s biggest health care companies, canceled her coverage.

Bates told ABC News, “I have two chemotherapy sessions, then we find out the surgeon hasn’t been paid. The anaesthesiologist hasn’t been paid, and the cancer doctor has not been paid.”

With $200,000 in medical bills, she sued for $6 million. Her lawsuit revealed that Health Net actually set goals for its employees to cancel policies, and the carrier paid more than $20,000 in bonuses to its senior cancellation specialist.

Court documents show that over six years Health Net canceled 1,600 policies, avoiding at least $35.5 million in medical expenses. In 2002, the goal was set at 180 cancellations and was exceeded by its cancellation specialist, who dropped 275 policies that year.

Capitalism is the greatest system in the world for creating economic wealth and consumer goods. It is absolutely wonderful for providing all the flat screen tvs we could ever need. What the avid free-marketeers seem blinded to is that when its economic imperatives work against the public good, capitalistic efficiency becomes a curse, not a blessing. Regulating these excesses and taking over where markets fail is what government is for.

On the other hand, I’m sure the “senior cancellation specialist” can afford a very nice car.

Photo by Library of Congress via pingnews.

interfaith dialogue of the day, part VII

In Bangkok, integrating mass transit with urban life is taken to a whole new level.

recommended reading

Sorry, blog readers, for not posting as much lately. I am on the home stretch of my thesis, and blogging will have to slow down for awhile so that I might graduate. But if you’re interested in my posts on the politics of religion, here’s something else to read. Beliefnet has a “Blogalogue” (horrible word, I know) about the current state of the evangelical movement in America. The contributors come from many different perspectives, politically and religiously, and so far the discussion has been fascinating. Check it out here.

If environmental issues are more up your alley, the Norman Sustainability Network’s Web site has recently been redesigned in a blog format. If you want to get involved locally in environmental issues, NSN always welcomes new members. We are working on getting a team of bloggers to post there, leading up to the statewide Oklahoma Sustainability Network conference in March.

Also on the environment beat is Dot Earth, a new blog at the New York Times by veteran environment reporter Andrew Revkin. He’s also put together a narrated slideshow that he describes as “outlining the learning curve that drove me to focus my career, and this blog, on the evolving human relationship with the home planet and with one another.”