The State Budget and Poverty

Op-ed at http://bangordailynews.com/2011/05/26/opinion/contributors/the-state-budget-and-poverty/?ref=mostReadBox

GUEST COLUMN

By Alice Bolstridge, Special to the BDN

Posted May 26, 2011, at 6:42 p.m.

I grew up in poverty in the ’30s, ’40s and ’50s. With a crippled father and a sickly mother, neither one of whom completed elementary school, we often were dependent on state welfare and charity from relatives and neighbors for the basic necessities of food, clothing and health care.

All six of us siblings eventually worked our way out of poverty and far enough up the rungs of the middle-class ladder that we could provide through work the basics for ourselves most of the time and contribute as taxpayers. Though some of my siblings would argue that they pulled themselves up by their own bootstraps, as “rugged individualist” wisdom suggests we all should, I know that none of us do it by ourselves.

First, we survived childhood as healthy as we did with the aid of a social safety net that provided for much of our food and health care. Second, we all were educated through high school by a publicly funded education system. Third, we all received some sort of training beyond high school that was in large measure publicly funded.

Upon graduation from high school, my older sister received a scholarship to a business school that led to a job in the Veterans’ Administration, where she spent her entire career helping to administer the design and construction of veterans’ hospitals, a publicly funded enterprise. All four of my brothers joined the publicly funded military after high school, which provided not only training useful in later civilian life but also some lifelong health benefits.

My publicly funded education provided a few great teachers who awakened my sleepy brain and nurtured my intellectual development all the way through higher education and beyond. Yes, I paid for a good part of my adult education by teaching part time, but I also was helped by scholarships and publicly funded grants. Other forms of education, in whole or in part publicly funded, such as PBS and senior education, continue through old age.

With this proposed Maine state budget, the important social safety nets that are the major drivers in lifting people out of poverty and into tax-paying status are under threat. The proposed changes to pension and health care contributions of teachers and other state workers can only serve to discourage great teachers like I have known as well as those who work with the mentally and physically challenged, many of whom can become taxpayers with the right care.

The budget proposes egregious cuts to Maine’s poor workers, particularly in the area of health care, cuts that can only serve to increase the costs to the rest of us.

Increasing the economic distress of the poor, which this budget proposal would do, cannot improve the Maine economy overall. Neither can other actions such as recent passage of the health insurance bill, LD 1333, and the removal of the labor mural from the Department of Labor building in Augusta, which reflects the administration’s lack of respect for Maine’s labor force, a vital necessity to the Maine economy.

The policies and proposed budget of this administration and Legislature amount to economic attacks on teachers, state workers, low-earning wage workers and micro-businesses, which together are vital to the Maine economy. Such actions only serve to exacerbate the problem of poverty, not just for the poor but for all of us. And for what? To give tax breaks that further enrich the already rich?

Supporting Maine Woods Workers

Testimony Opposing LD 1383 – An Act to Improve the Process by Which Logging Contractors Hire Legal Foreign Workers, May 6, 2011

by Shelly Mountain

 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dgWuH5-GnDM
 

I am from Mapleton and the much maligned Aroostook County. My grandfather worked in the woods with horses, my father hauled pulp wood, my husband owns a log truck, and my son would like to. I am here to testify in opposition to this bill that would make it easier to hire foreign labor. I will be 50 years old this fall and the Canadian labor issue has existed all of my life. As a little girl I remember men parking their trucks across Route 11 in an effort to get the attention of Augusta. Senator Jackson has worked hard to find solutions to the problem. Now this legislature appears determined to not only reverse any progress he has made but also to blame the hard working loggers for their own demise. The arguments I have heard against Maine loggers are varied and vague.

When I asked two Aroostook County representatives why they voted against Maine loggers they told me that no one came here to speak in their favor. To the extent that some truth exists in that it is because they fear reprisals that would worsen their already bad situation. In asking people to come down here today I was told that they would like to, that they are frustrated that their own equipment sits idle while Canadians are working, but that they couldn’t testify because they want to keep the jobs they do have. I understand that and in fact share that fear myself. I worry that my testimony may threaten my own family’s livelihood.

Representative Peter Rioux has argued that Canadian labor should be favored because, “they are more productive, they show up for work . . . they work harder, they complain less.” I have invited Rep. Rioux to spend a day working with my husband to understand how productive and hard working he is. I invite any of you to do the same. But you had better go to bed early the night before because his day starts at 1:00 in the morning and you had better be prepared for an overnight because he often sleeps in his truck. I should add that he does this all without complaint.

Representative Crockett is quoted in the Bangor Daily as saying, “the reality is bonded labor keeps the price of wood down, it keeps mills open and it keeps a market for people like my dad who sell wood.” It is not the purpose of the legislature to manipulate the price of wood and doing so is a violation of federal trade law and the bonded labor program. Bonded labor has been used in Northern Maine for a long time and it has not prevented the closing of mills there, rather it has accelerated it.

In the BDN Senator Trahan has dismissed Senator Jackson’s efforts as just, “an issue for the loggers in his district. But for everyone else in the state it could create a serious disadvantage.” I have left messages for Senator Trahan asking him to explain how hiring Maine labor creates any kind of disadvantage but he has never gotten back to me. I assume he is also talking about keeping the price of wood down. The wood that is harvested and trucked by Canadian labor is for the most part not going to Maine mills. As I have said there are few mills left up there for it to go to. This wood that these legislators are trying to manipulate the price of is all going to Canadian mills to employ more Canadians. The wood then comes back as a cheap, subsidized, finished product that undercuts our industries and puts even more Mainers out of work. The bonded labor program is only supposed to be accessed when domestic labor is unavailable. There are many Maine loggers whose equipment sits idle while foreign labor is doing the job and they are defaulting on loans for that equipment. No matter how some try to construe it, Maine’s economy and certainly Maine’s workers do not benefit from the hiring of Canadian labor.

I urge you to do the right thing and support Maine loggers by voting against this bill. It is wrong to make it easier to hire foreign labor that takes jobs away from hard working, productive Maine loggers.

Troy Haines,  http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a7BlCSYttuU

Single Payer System for Maine: www.maineallcare.org

Tuesday, May 3, 2011, four of us from Aroostook County, traveled to Augusta to attend the hearing on a bill to provide a single-payer health-care system for Maine.  It was one of the most gratifying experiences of my recent political activity.  Many people showed up to testify in support of the bill, LD 1397, and the opposition disappeared from the room as it came time for their testimony.    One lone opponent who appeared to be an insurance lobbyist showed up after testimony closed and asked to be permitted to speak.  He did, and that proved to be a fitting closure to the testimony because he did not address any of the specifics of the bill, and all he did say served to convince us that he had not read it.  Much of the testimony focused on a variety of problems the bill could resolve, including creating a more friendly business environmnet for Maine and providing a more level competitive playing field for Maine workers in the global market.  Following is testimony two of us gave on Tuesday.  It addresses some of the personal stresses faced by individuals trying to get affordable health care insurance that the single-payer bill would help to alleviate. 

Testimony in favor of LD 1397

An Act To Establish a Single-payor Health Care System To Be Effective in 2017

by Alice Bolstridge 

I am a retired teacher with a Maine State Retirement pension.  When I signed up for Medicare in 2003, the only additional coverage I could get for which the MSR System would pay their share was Aetna, the company providing my health insurance at the time of retirement.  I started paying about $350 a month from my own pocket, and the premium went up every year.  At some point I needed surgery and was hospitalized for several days.  When the bills started coming in, I discovered that I did not have the supplement plan I thought I had, but a catastrophic insurance plan that also provided some coverage for prescription drugs which I didn’t need.  Aetna did not pay any of the co-pay expenses for the surgery and hospital stay.  By this time my premium was up to about $450 a month.  With the state’s share, my insurance was costing over $700 a month.  Not only was I getting ripped off, the state was, too.  As a taxpayer, I was cheated twice to pay for Aetna profits.  The whole experience was a nightmare with trying to figure out if I should blame the insurance company or the providers who kept harassing me with bills. 

When the collection agency threatened me, I paid the bill to get some peace of mind, but my trust in some of the health care providers involved in that has never recovered.  I don’t intend to recover trust in for-profit insurance.  It is foolish for any of us to trust our health to companies whose only motive is profit.  And it is foolish to trust providers who are encouraged by the way they are paid to compromise quality of care and to waste money for unnecessary procedures.  I dropped Aetna coverage and picked up an Advantage plan.  I don’t trust them either.   They start you out cheap and then increase the premiums by 100 percent or more every year.  The first one stopped offering the product I had after about 2 years.  The one I have now started out with a payment of $0 per month and increased the premium to $50 per month the first year.  I don’t even know how to calculate that percentage.  These companies are getting subsidized by the federal government; we are cheated again.

When I first began my experience with a non-profit Blue Cross/ Blue Shield decades ago, our insurance life was simple and worry-free.  Faced with a life-threatening illness of one child that went on for several years and involved several hospital stays, we all—the patient, his family, and the providers—could focus on the medical problems of the illness, not on what we would have to sacrifice to pay for the treatment.   We need a payment system that returns us to that simplicity, effectiveness, and trust. 

This bill is especially important in view of the Health Care bill, LD 1333, that was already voted out of committee as ought to pass and is especially bad for seniors, rural areas, cancer patients, and people with other preexisting conditions.  Mainers, support LD 1397, and get for-profit insurance companies out of the health care business.

by Shelly Mountain.

I am here to support single-payer. I live in Mapleton with my husband and two sons. We are small business owners which means that we have an individual insurance plan. Until just a month ago we were paying Anthem $516 a month for a policy with a $15,000 deductible. It covered absolutely nothing before that $15,000 deductible. We were paying $6200 a year and still responsible for all of our medical expenses, which usually works out to at least that same amount in a year. I have stopped going to the doctor myself for any reason. I have strong family histories of both breast and colon cancer
but I do not get mammograms or colonoscopies because I can’t afford them. My understanding is that the Affordable Care Act now requires those things to be covered through insurance but Anthem never told me that and since my policy was grandfathered into the old system they were not required to cover those
things under that policy. The only way I found out about it was when I testified in March against their proposed rate increases. It is common practice at Anthem to keep policy holders in the dark about anything that would benefit the policy holder.

My 12 year old son was involved in a snowmobile accident this past winter and complained of severe pain from what he believed was a broken a rib. I hesitated about taking him to the ER. I knew an ER visit would be very expensive and that it would probably involve an expensive X-ray. I wondered, “Can they even do anything for a broken rib?” I ended up going because he was complaining about pain when he breathed. The winter before that I waited 3 days when he had a severe sore throat and fever before I finally took him in to find out he had strep throat and double ear infection. Untreated strep can be very dangerous.
I pay Anthem $6200 a year and I still struggle with whether I can afford a strep test on my son. I pay Anthem $6200 a year and still I have bill collectors calling and harassing me for payment of medical bills. I pay Anthem $6200 a year that I receive no benefit from. Where does all that money go?  Last year Anthem’s treasurer, R. David Kreschmer, had a compensation package that totaled almost $2.4 million. Last year the CEO of Anthem’s parent company, Wellpoint, was paid $13.1 million. Last year Anthem contributed money to political campaigns, including Governor LePage’s transition. They use my money to affect legislation that will add to their profits but exacerbate my ability to be a responsible parent. I have been financing my own worsening healthcare situation.

This shameful condition will continue to worsen as long as health care remains an industry motivated only by profits. The insurance companies have made it obvious that they are unwilling to contain their costs. They have made it clear that they value high executive pay and profit above the health care of their subscribers. Insurance is the only business that exists by charging increasingly excessive prices while providing absolutely no service. Insurance was originally developed as a means for many people to pool resources that could be used to help community members when they incurred costs that no one of them could afford individually. It is no longer that. It has become something in itself that fewer and fewer people can afford. We need to return it to its roots. A single payer system would provide a more reasonable and just pricing structure. Fewer administrative costs would mean that more money would actually be spent on citizen’s health care needs. Insurance companies and the executives who run
them would stop profiting off the suffering of Maine citizens.

Cheapest Pleasures

That man is richest whose pleasures are the cheapest.

Henry David Thoreau

By way of metaphorical usage, cheap has acquired connotations of seedy, disreputable, worthless, but Thoreau meant it literally to refer to the minor cost of spiritual riches attained from a frugal life.  One example is the cheap pleasure of imagining owning a house with some property as opposed to actually owning it:

An afternoon sufficed to lay out the land into orchard, woodlot, and a pasture, and to decide what fine oaks or pines should be left to stand before the door, and whence each blasted tree could be seen to the best advantage; and then I let it lie, fallow perchance, for a man is rich in proportion to the number of things when he can afford to let alone. 

Tolstoy also has a short fable, “How much Land does a Man Need?” about a man with just enough land to supply his basic needs who seeks more.   Every acquisition of new property increases his hunger for more until, eventually, he sacrifices everything and literally runs himself to death seeking more land. 

In spite of proclaimed values in agreement with Thoreau and Tolstoy about simplicity and frugality, I find myself in old age often distressed about how to manage bookkeeping and maintenance of property and possessions.   I have way too much stuff.  Shelves and shelves and shelves house close to a thousand books.   They take up living space, perpetually need dusting, and the only reason I don’t own more is that I give so many away to make room for more.   Surrounding my work desk and leaving only narrow aisles to get to books, filing cabinets bulge with over forty years of accumulated drafts of writing projects and paperwork from managing real estate, personal accounts, and investments.  To simplify my life, I sold a big old house I owned and invested the money, which earns some interest, which I must manage, capital—ugh.  And then I bought another house bigger than I need.  So I now have, again, gardening and snow-removal machines and paraphernalia, an over supplied kitchen, and stuffed closets.  All of this always needs organizing which, like dusting, never gets completed.  Vanity, all vanity.  Just the sheer number of possessions and money complicates my life and interferes with the pursuit of the cheapest pleasures I believe to be the best.  Pleasures like observation, contemplation, and creative social activity.

With all of this, by today’s standards, the entire value of my possessions does not qualify me as above lower middle-class in the prevailing view of American-dream aspirations.  Except for the aspirations of our Maine Governor who asserts that his proposed budget puts anyone with an annual income above 19,000 + a few dollars in the rich income-tax bracket and thus the beneficiary of a tax cut amounting to about 6-10 dollars.   Still, relative to the poverty in the world, I am too rich.  

My country is too rich, too greedy, spends too much money on trivial luxuries.  Multi-car garages house air- polluting vehicles at private homes.  Multi-billion dollar industries finance sports teams, junk movies, junk TV shows, junk news as entertainment, and junk internet products for addicted spectators who require ever increasing and costly fixes of escape from the cheap pleasures of stimulating and socially valuable work, conversation, and activity.  Huge shopping malls, both mini and maxi, provide an endless stream of useless consumer paraphernalia.  Garish advertising litters the landscape and the mind and extinguishes cheap pleasures of natural and artistic beauty.  Multi-billion-dollar profits of corporations feed a lust for ever-more power that money buys.  Adding insult to injury, our government practices spending priorities that encourages all of this—when facing a national crisis, President Bush said, “Go to Disneyland.”  Spend money.  Have a good time.   The energy it takes to fuel all these trivial pursuits pollutes and degrades the earth that could with the right values and priorities supply all of our most basic needs and all of our cheapest, most satisfying pleasures.  

The more we spend in pursuit of mind- and spirit-deadening pleasures of escape, greed, and power, the more we resort to war to protect and keep our American way of life, nearly perpetual war since the founding of our nation.  In my lifetime, WW II, the Cold War that took in the hot sites of Korea and Viet Nam, Wars in the Near East—Iraq, Afghanistan, now Libya, and our interminable military support for Israel and all over the rest of the world.  War, with all the expense of its production and repair of collateral damage, is the costliest luxury.  And there is no appetite by either of the major political parties to even reduce war, let alone eliminate it, as a way to resolve international conflicts.   The spending-cut deal for 2011 negotiated by Boehner, Reid, and Obama does not touch military spending, over half the total budget.  Seeing how often the right thing to do gets compromised, I’m deferring judgment about Obama’s promises to cut military spending in the future. 

There are known solutions to these problems if we can collectively find the will to apply them.  Likely the best place to start is to reduce the obscene gap between rich and poor that grows and grows.  In “Equality is Better—for Everyone,”  Richard Wilkinson & Kate Pickett use comparison studies between the more income-equal nations like Japan and the Nordic countries and the less equal ones like the U.S., Britain, and Portugal to show that “inequality is socially corrosive” for everyone, not just the poor.  In countries where the gap between the rich and the poor is smaller,

the statistics show that community life is stronger and levels of trust are higher.  There is also less violence, including lower homicide rates; physical and mental health tends to be better and life expectancy is higher . . . . prison populations are smaller, teenage birth rates are lower, educational scores tend to be higher, there is less obesity and more social mobility.

. . . . . . . . . .

Even the well-off do better in more equal countries . . . . live longer and enjoy better health . . . . Everyone enjoys the benefits of living in a more trusting, less violent society. . . . More equal countries give more in foreign aid and score better on the Global Peace Index.  They recycle a higher proportion of their waste and think it more important to abide by international environmental agreements. 

In contrast,

mental illness is three times more common in more unequal countries [U. S. is the most unequal in the world] than in the most equal, obesity rates are twice as high, rates of imprisonment eight times higher, and teenage births increase tenfold.  (People First Economics)

Individually, we would be healthier by getting out of the car more often and enjoying the cheap pleasures of walking, running, or biking (and the earth would thrive better, too).  We would be happier as well as healthier if we channeled our hunger for power into gaining control over expensive entertainment appetites that are never satisfied.  Collectively, we would improve the mental health of ourselves and our culture by taxing obscene riches of the entertainment industries and applying the revenue to full funding of PBS and to high quality education and health care for all.  We could provide for the earth’s health and welfare by requiring all polluting enterprises to pay for cleaning up the messes they produce and then to stop polluting.  We could substantially reduce the national debt by requiring corporations with huge profits and financial institutions that are too big to fail to pay their fair share.  See Bernie Sanders’ list of the top ten freeloading corporations who not only don’t pay taxes but get subsidies, refunds and bailouts from the rest of us who do:  http://www.nytimes.com/2010/11/24/business/economy/24econ.html. We could further reduce the debt and would all be physically, mentally, and spiritually healthier with individual and collective commitments to put costly violence and war behind us as outmoded solutions, and to leave the world a cheaper, more peaceful place than we find it. 

Peace Rally, Bangor, Maine

April 9, 2011

http://www.peacectr.org/

Alice, Mike, Steve

from the Peace and Justice Center of Aroostook

which meets every Sunday at noon since the invasion of Iraq in 2003

to walk for peace across the Aroostook River Bridge. 

JOIN US WHEREVER YOU ARE!



Study Peace

March marks the 8^th anniversary of the invasion of Iraq, and we have not completed that war.  In October, we will have 10 years at war in Afghanistan, and we have yet to begin the draw down of combat operations there.  The total cost of these wars is above $1.16 trillion and counting, over $700 million a day by conservative estimates. It is millions more if considering all the associated costs of maintaining the military industrial complex and repairing the damage caused by war.  Leaving aside for a moment the social and moral costs of war, can we afford this kind of expense when we have such looming unsolved economic problems here?  

Consider health care so costly that many of our citizens can’t afford it even with the Affordable Health Care Act that is under threat, state budgets in so much trouble they are threatening massive layoffs and cuts in essential social services and infrastructure to avoid bankruptcy, a national debt that exceeds $14 trillion, rampant and uncontrolled greed in our financial institutions that caused a massive recession and that show no signs I have seen of reforming or being reformed, an environment increasingly at risk, increased taxes on the lower middle-class while taxes are cut for the most wealthy.   No, we can’t afford the mounting costs of resorting to war to resolve our security problems and international disputes. 

And now--war in Libya!?!

We study and learn the practice of war.  We pour our best resources into improving our military capability.  Imagine what would happen if we began to draw down our commitment to war and turned those abilities and resources to learning and practicing peaceful conflict resolution.  For that we need moral commitment from citizens and institutions together.  A better, more peaceful world will not happen only by individuals just improving themselves, though that is a good and necessary thing to do.  But then, like Buddha, or Christ, or Mohammed, the individual needs to take some responsibility for improving the world. 

©Alice Bolstridge, 2011. 

A pre-Libya version of this post was published as a Letter to the Editor

in The Star Herald, Presque Isle, Maine, 2-16-2011.

Stigma

            The American Heritage Dictionary says an archaic meaning of stigma is “a mark burned into the skin of a criminal or slave; brand;” the term has evolved to connote attitudes of disgrace or disrespect toward social abnormalities and “inferiors.”  However, the plural stigmata carries very different connotations of religious honor and high esteem: “Marks or sores corresponding to and resembling the crucifixion wounds of Jesus, sometimes occurring in religious ecstasy or hysteria.” 

            St. Francis of Assisi received stigmata, and the church canonized him as well as other bearers of stigmata.  Hysteria suggests the disrespect with which our modern culture generally views such phenomena, the beliefs that have surrounded them in the past, and the stigma that has always been and continues to be attached to mental illnesses: “abnormalities” of thinking, feeling, and behaving that “normals” shy away from, ridicule, or punish.  One constant in the evolution of the term, is that the bearer of stigmata—criminal, slave, or saint—suffers. 

            I was five years old, my first year in a small rural school, when an early memory of feeling stigmatized was formed.  It was in the spring of the year before a town meeting, likely part of a Social Studies lesson.  I can still see vividly that setting:  gray-haired teacher sitting in a chair, half-glasses perched on her nose,  children clustered around, most sitting at their desks, a few like me standing close to her, looking at the annual town report from which she read the list of town poor.  Our family’s name was first on the list. 

            I remember nothing else about the occasion except the shame I felt so promptly and profoundly that it must have been conditioned by earlier economically shameful events that I have no conscious memory of.  I knew that poverty so great as to get your name listed in a public report was a disgrace.

            The mark that left has never left me.  Regardless of whatever success or failure or financial security I attain, I suffer, at times, a sense that I am suffocating at the bottom of whatever social heap I find myself, that I am trying to squirm my way up—ambition—into what I imagine is the fresh air at the top, or squirm my way out—isolation—and escape the confines of the heap entirely.  Though I often force myself to act on the former rather than the latter urges, I mostly want to do the latter whenever I feel that flush of shame at some seemingly inconsequential slight.  Family born into, school, family created, work, community, nation, world— all are social heaps, and the larger the heap I imagine the greater the suffocation feelings, at times. 

We carry many stigmata imposed by culture:  shames about gender, sexual orientation, and other preferred sexual behaviors; shames about race,  ethnicity, religion;  shames about a variety of disabilities considered abnormal.  Some of my most troubling shames concern events associated with mental illnesses in my family and the stigma that surrounds them.    Over the more than three decades since my son was diagnosed with schizophrenia, I have worked very hard at refusing to allow social image to govern my feelings and actions with him.  Still, I am often too embarrassed to appear in some public places with him when he is most acutely suffering symptoms—poor hygiene, gesturing to his voices, laughing loudly at “jokes God tells.”  In allowing my behavior to be controlled by shame, I not only bear stigma, I support it and pass it on.  That adds to my shame, and it breaks my heart.  

Normalcy is a social construct; it requires early and sustained training.  We all mostly grow up and mostly learn to suppress and repress, to manage our image, to pretend we are fine all the time. We do this so successfully that we lose touch with our most basic desires, and the stigmata do not show much in what the world sees.  We lose our selves. We become normal and stigmatize the abnormal. This makes all of life tragic.  But those afflicted with a chronic and disabling mental illness are, by definition, unable to conform; and they are routinely stigmatized for their poverty as well as for behavior.   They squirm their way to the outer edges of the heap where they are ignored, harassed, or abused.  They suffer more from stigma than from the economic, mental, or emotional effects of their condition.  They isolate, neglect self-care, and retreat more and more into beliefs that are at odds with social norms.  Their most important and intimate relationships are wounded by stigma effects in ways that are never fully healed.

The persistent stigmatization of the poor and the mentally ill costs the whole society.  It costs money, a lot of money, for life-long care of these disabled many of whom, but for the effects of stigma, could be taxpayers.  And it costs in feelings of despair and powerlessness of them, their families, and all who would like to care for them.  It costs the world in the dreams of power through violence that it spawns and that some like Jared Lee Laughner act out.  When normals will react violently in protest against dehumanizing and disrespectful treatment, is it any wonder that some of the mentally ill will do the same and become the highly visible ones in the media—criminals, chronic drug addicts, sex offenders, serial killers, child or parent killers? 

The wonder is that, statistically, people with mental illness are not more violent than the “normal” population.  However, the statistics only consider criminal violence.  If socially sanctioned violence is considered—war; abusive treatment in asylums, jails, and prisons including capital punishment; institutionally hidden and thus socially sanctioned sexual assault; political assassination—socially normal people with power to exercise are far more dangerous than the stigmatized mentally ill. 

Surely these costs are known to all who think seriously about this issue, and yet stigma is still the primal glue of social cohesion.  Paradoxically, it affects behavior in ways that keep the glue cracking.   Slaves, ethnic and religious minorities, women, homosexuals, the jobless—all publicly revolt against cultural norms at great personal and social costs.  History provides a record of social infrastructures continuously coming unglued by such revolts. 

Families feud and break up.  Shakespeare’s greatest tragedies show the disastrous effects:  Hamlet, Othello, and King Lear are all ashamed and enraged by suspected betrayal of family-loyalty expectations.  Churches splinter, and nations war and fracture.  Fundamentalists of all faiths often torture nonconformists.  Wars all over the Middle East and the West continue an ancient family feud among the descendents of Abraham—Jews, Christians, Muslims—about revolting from approved ways.  Hitler and his Nazi followers, ashamed and enraged at suspected impurities, exterminated them as fast as they could.  That war divided nations all over Europe and the Middle East.  The painful hangovers continue with revolutionary protests now occurring all over the Middle East.

But surely we are making progress as a species with these social ills, aren’t we?  Women, homosexuals, blacks, and other racial and ethnic minorities, for instance, in this country are no longer routinely stigmatized institutionally by our laws.  At least not as much and not as overtly?   We have a black president.  And consciousness raising has turned the tables by stigmatizing insulting and disrespectful behavior and language directed at certain classes so that at least some groups of people enjoy some respite from the most overt ridicule and abuse that was normal practice only 60 years ago.  Things are slowly getting better, aren’t they?  Shouldn’t we be patient with the slow pace of social evolution? 

We ought to rest uneasily on any progress laurels, for there are compelling reasons to retain moral vigilance.  The numbers in the largest and costliest classes of people—the destitute poor, the mentally disabled, the criminal population—are not declining; they are increasing.  Who constitutes the largest numbers among the poor?  Women, children, racial and ethnic minorities, the mentally ill.   Who constitutes the largest numbers among the criminal population?  Men, minorities, the mentally ill.  That covers a lot of human territory. 

I seem to be on a tirade here, cursing the darkness of human suffering.  I hoped, as I always do, that this post would light at least one candle of understanding that could illuminate a direction at least, if not a genuine path, toward change in the way we socialize our children, and in the way we treat our unsocialized.  Perhaps the next post, or the next book, or . . .

Here, a very early memory, among my earliest:  A consequence of being poor and on welfare is that the state nurse visited us regularly when I was very small.  She pronounced my outie navel a rupture and taped a coin or button on it every time she came.  As soon as I could get away, I ripped it off.  If it was a whole quarter, I rushed to the village store and bought a Peppermint Patty and Orange Crush—ecstasy.  I never wore that cure.  My navel remained abnormal until I gave birth the first time whereupon it became normal on its own.  It has remained so to this day, except for later months of other pregnancies at which time it is normal to have an outie.  I enjoy this memory.  I see it as a time when I acted naturally instead of normally, when I simply tore away the patch on my abnormality and let it protrude. 

The suffering of stigma comes from the terrible tensions between social requirements and natural impulses as Sigmund Freud so eloquently explains in Civilization and its Discontents.  I yearn to put myself and my world in harmony with nature by doing something as simple as tearing away the patchwork.  Simple but not easy.  What is difficult is the willingness to change ourselves, to tear away our own prejudices without waiting for applause from the crowd, and then to pass on our experience whenever and wherever we can.  Thus we might, one by one, become a crowd and transform the world.