He's Ba[ra]ck

He’s back. The tall, skinny guy I voted for in November 2008. You know, the one from Illinois, who brought to mind comparisons with that other tall, skinny president from the Prairie State. Yes, he’s back, and not a moment too soon.

With his health care legislation adopted a week ago, President Obama managed in just a few days to issue new protections for mortgage defaulters; to negotiate a new arms control treaty with Russia; to confront—in person—Afghan president Harmid Karzai on corruption and mismanagement; and to appoint 15 new government officials, whose nominations had been blocked for months by Senate Republicans.

Instead of yet further efforts to work with his recalcitrant opponents in the misguided hope of bipartisanship, Barack Obama seized the power bestowed on him on November 4, 2008, and restored his promise to work on behalf of ordinary Americans.

Now, can he build on this momentum and back the cause of financial reform? To do so, he must be willing to take on his friends in Wall Street and not worry that they won’t like him anymore. And he needs to call out the Republicans for where they stand: on the side of big banks and unregulated financial gluttons.

He’s moving in the right direction. The health care legislation, however flawed, signaled a government that finally recognized and acted on the needs of every-day citizens. Financial reform needs this same level of recognition and passion on the part of President Obama.

Let’s hope that he keeps his boxing gloves on and doesn’t retreat into that passive place of his that doesn’t do any of us any good.

Henny-Penny Redux

A funny thing happened on the way to the grocery store: I spotted a large, black chicken walking in the ditch across the street. Only it wasn’t a chicken; it was a turkey vulture.

Not knowing this, I became a modern-day Henny-Penny and sounded the alarm: “One of Eric’s chickens is loose,” I shouted to my family. My mind raced ahead to the fear that my neighbor’s wandering hen would be hit by a car, or worse, torn apart by dogs. But when my husband strolled outside and laughed at the huge turkey vulture masquerading as a chicken, I realized my mistake and betrayed, once again, my suburban roots.

Chicken keepers are springing up all around Durham, now that a new ordinance has allowed their presence. Those of us lucky enough to eat the resulting eggs know that we’re eating something different. The yolks are a deeper shade of yellow, the shells are tougher, and the eggs themselves taste richer.

What I like most, though, are the colors of the shells. When Eric and Katie bring us a new dozen, there’s often at least one that’s a light pink. Some are gray, and others are tan and cream-colored. None are bleached white, like the ones you get at Kroger.

They also have warts and spots on them, and they range in size.

Sort of like people.

And sort of like the health care bill. Some, who like Henny-Penny, think the sky is falling and America is doomed. And the rest of us who know an acorn when it hits us: the start of a whole new life and a whole new way of taking care of ourselves and each other.

First Lady Rising

Michelle Obama took on the giants of the food industry last week, as she continued her efforts to eradicate childhood obesity. In speaking to the Grocery Manufacturers Association, she told representatives of some of the leading junk food generators that there “needs to be a serious industry-wide commitment to providing the healthier foods parents are looking for at prices they can afford.''

Good for her. It’s time that someone of prominence assumed the lead in tackling one of the most serious health challenges we face.

And she’s going about it in the right way. Last month she launched “Let’s Move,” a comprehensive approach that addresses the problem at many levels and amasses the support of both public and private agencies.

“Let’s Move” brings to mind the efforts of Lady Bird Johnson, whose name became synonymous with “Keep America Beautiful.” Though Mrs. Johnson’s efforts began as a project to beautify areas around the White House and along the mall, she quickly expanded her mission to include urban renewal and environmental preservation. Her agenda focused on national forests and parks, air pollution regulation, and beautification of highways. The bursts of floral color we see in the spring and summer along many of our interstates derive from Mrs. Johnson’s vision.

Her multi-faceted campaign wasn’t free from controversy, however. When she supported an act to restrict roadside billboard advertising and remove junkyard eyesores from the landscape—concepts now widely endorsed in many communities—she was ridiculed and opposed by strong unions and lobbyists.

Michelle Obama will no doubt encounter similar resistance. But like Mrs. Johnson, she’s tough. And she’s not shying away from the complexity of the challenge before her.

Most of us today wouldn’t dream of throwing trash out our car windows. This wasn’t always the case. Thanks to Mrs. Johnson and her support of “Keep America Beautiful,” none of us wanted to be litter bugs.

Perhaps some day, owing to Michelle Obama’s foresight and leadership, most of us won’t want a super-sized soda or a fat-laden burger either.

Stacking up to Two³

I wonder if Durham artist Vernon Pratt ever imagined the delight he would give the kids of our city long after the Royall Center for the Arts was built and dedicated. “All the Possibilities of Stacking Up to Two³ to Sit On” reads the inscription by Pratt in 1988. Had he known, he might have added the words “. . . and to Play Games On.”

These granite cubes embedded in the yard of the Durham Arts Council building have hosted freeze tag, hide and seek, and—when children get older—games with elaborate rules that mystify adults. These blocks belong to the kids, right in the middle of the city where the grit of buses and ever-present road construction have replaced the sweet smell of tobacco.

This is old-fashioned play: the kids are in charge, fashioning fun from the tools at hand. No adults run along the sidewalk blowing whistles and refereeing disputes, and parents aren’t shrieking from the sidelines. They talk amongst themselves or their minds wander elsewhere as their kids leap from one cube to another, defying the sharp edges of the blocks.

It’s a peaceful place, these cubes stacked upon cubes. A respite from a frantic world that doesn’t give children enough rest.

I think Professor Pratt may have known after all. Stacking up possibilities is endless when you mix an artist’s vision with the imaginative world of childhood and give them a chance to flourish.

Bring on the Nerds

Have you heard the good news? The solution to our education mess is at hand: all we have to do is get rid of bad teachers. Check out the cover of Newsweek if you’re in doubt: “The Key to Saving American Education” is emblazoned on a blackboard, along with the words “We must fire bad teachers” written repeatedly in childish scrawl. (Click HERE)

It’s true, there are bad teachers, and they’re hard to get rid of. But there are also bad doctors, bad lawyers, and bad journalists. And they’re hard to get rid of, too.

Buried in Newsweek’s 8-page, teacher-bashing coverage are some of the issues. One is the problem of parental involvement, or what I call parental guidance. I’ve spent 16 years as a public-school parent in an urban district, and it’s pretty clear: the kids whose parents can’t or don’t provide a home environment conducive to learning are the kids who don’t learn.

Second is the problem of classroom management. It’s not only new teachers who can’t manage the incredibly bad behavior of students today; experienced teachers have trouble, too. Whenever our schools in Durham have drawn up new assignment maps, each time I’ve seen excellent, long-time teachers struggle to manage the new population. These aren’t bad teachers; they’re simply not equipped for classroom combat.

Third lies in this observation from Newsweek: “In Europe, where teachers enjoy more social prestige and higher salaries, schools have no trouble attracting new teachers with strong academic records.” For me this gets to the heart of the matter. We as a culture don’t value education—and never have—as it’s valued in other parts of the world. Look no farther than all the money and time devoted to sports in our schools.

Maybe it’s our frontier heritage that valued brawn over brains, but smart people here are pointy-headed nerds and always have been. When this finally changes, we may see the change we claim to hope for.

Guinea Pigs Unite

With Duke University Medical Center practically in our backyards, my neighbors and I don’t have far to go for the latest and greatest in medical technology. Indeed, it often is great, and my family has benefited from the expertise concentrated in just a few square miles of white coats and hospital scrubs.

But there’s a downside, and it’s one that gets played out all over the country. With more and more medical tools (I almost wrote “toys”) available to our physicians, we are referred more and more often for expensive, unnecessary tests.

At my annual check-up last year, I mentioned two unrelated symptoms to my doctor—poor circulation from Reynaud’s syndrome and tingling in my leg from a tight cast. Before I knew it, she had linked the two together and had written up orders for two neurological studies, which ended up costing me over $250.

I realized later that she had played successfully on my fear of an old cancer. “With your health history,” she said, “we can never be too careful.” Never mind that these symptoms were readily explained and hardly indicative of cancer.

Even later I realized that she had earned extra money for referring me to specialized procedures. Money in her pocket, money out of mine.

I was duped again recently by my daughter’s pediatrician who, at an annual exam, noticed a tiny fraction of an inch where my daughter’s spine seemed off. Immediately she ordered an x-ray. “We better get a baseline,” she said. The x-ray showed nothing but a normal spine. Cost to us? One hundred dollars.

We are expensive guinea pigs in the hands of our doctors. They are free to pursue any line of medical inquiry that they can justify. They can play on our fears as patients and our fears as parents.

As long as money continues to play such a huge role in how we are doctored, we will continue to lose out. We will pay more money for less quality, even here, in the City of Medicine.

Lies Upon Lies

When Georgian athlete Nodar Kumaritashvili crashed and died on the Olympics luge track last month, we were told by the International Luge Federation that the tragedy was the result of human error, not “deficiencies in the track.” This announcement came despite complaints about the track by other athletes prior to the accident and despite the subsequent moves to raise the walls where Kumaritashvili died and to change “the ice profile.”

How many of us really believed that Nodar Kumaritashvili was at fault that day? Sports commentators and bloggers around the world called out the lie, but there it hung in the air for all of us to pretend we believed.

The art of the lie has become so commonplace that it’s really no longer an art. We are lied to so much of the time that we now have the industry of fact checking, and many of us don’t think twice when we see an athlete denying obvious steroid use or a politician rewriting history.

With so much lying going on, it’s hard to know whom to believe. So we often end up believing the people we like or the ones we voted for. But this isn’t how a functioning society works. It didn’t work in junior high, why should it work now?

The trouble with lies is that, at best, they diminish the humanity in all of us. At worst, people die: the invented discovery of weapons of mass destruction in Iraq took more lives than we will ever know.

The family and friends of Nodar Kumaritashvili should not have had to suffer the International Luge Federation’s cruel insult; their grief was exacerbated by the agency’s cowardice.

Not surprising, really, for cowardice is what lies are all about.

The Shame of Public Confession

Since when does Tiger Woods owe me an apology for his personal behavior? I don’t know him or his wife, and yet—according to today’s etiquette—he’s supposed to confess to me?

Is anyone else tired of this public self-flagellation that we now require of our public personalities?

I used to watch these events, but finally stopped after I saw the look on Silda Spitzer’s face in New York when her husband resigned as governor. The searing pain was unforgettable. I couldn’t figure out at the time why her expression haunted me. Now I know: we should not be privy to such private moments in the lives of other people, regardless of who they are.

Imagine cameras on our faces, catching us at the saddest, most disappointing moments in our lives.

We are a cruel society, tossing up some of our most beloved figures to the lions’ den as soon as we learn they’ve done something outside our sexual norms (defined by whom I’m not sure). We are unforgiving, extracting public humiliation for “sins” older than the Bible.

I learned as a child that there were personal sides of my life that belonged only to me. This lesson is now obsolete. Our children learn that it’s O.K. to expose that which is most private and to destroy other people's lives and their families along the way.

So I didn’t watch Tiger. I read enough of what he said to feel sorry for him that he felt pressured to say anything. He’s a great golfer, his gift to the world.

Why can’t we leave it at that?