Right Turn Microaggressions

A week or so ago I read an article in The Atlantic entitled The Coddling of the American Mind and ever since, I’ve been on the lookout for instances where I might be guilty myself of reacting to “microaggressions.”

I love that word.  Funny, although friends describe me as having an insatiable intellectual curiosity, I had not heard that word before even though it was coined back in 1970 when I was a college student.

Now, suddenly, I read it everywhere.

I highly recommend the article.  It deals with a new era of “political correctness” which is enforced today as much by conservatives and helicopter parents (click for humorous video) as it is as a pejorative toward liberals.

Actually, back in the 1970s, liberals used it as a form of self-ridicule until conservatives seized upon it as a pejorative by conservatives in 1990.  Now, if conservatives can see the humor, it appears it will be going full circle.

The authors of the article in this month’s Atlantic note that “There have always been some people who believe they have the right to not be offended.”

Today this translates into “demanding protection from words and ideas” we don’t like.

One of the first papers I read about political correctness was by Bill Lind, a cultural conservative and Tea Partier, who referred to political correctness as “cultural Marxism.”

He might not see the irony of conservatives now embracing “political correctness” e.g. outlawing use of the term climate change, for instance, or cherry-picking official duties like we saw in Kentucky, and refusing to read viewpoints with which they disagree.

In that 2000 paper, Lind observed, “Indeed, all ideologies are totalitarian because the essence of an ideology is to take some philosophy and say on the basis of this philosophy certain things must be true….”

Parenthetically Lind clarified that in his view “conservatism correctly understood is not an ideology…”

As many Southerners have for the past 150 years, I assume this is how he once rationalized that race relations today aren’t the result of slavery but the reconstruction following the Civil War.

Hmmm.  While I thought he was guilty of what he preached, I found his paper thought provoking which is why I always try to read from all sides of an issue.

Often this provides clarity for one’s own thinking even if the viewpoints expressed seem objectionable.

The way I found that “microaggressions” may apply to me is about something not nearly so heavy.

Durham, NC is in the process of taking a roadway down to two lanes as it passes through the Rockwood District,  just south of where I live.

A business or two objected even though the realignment would create more desperately needed street parking as well as additional traffic from customers who would then walk or bike.

If the alterations backfire though, it will be because of a quirk in the way most North Carolinas drive compared to other states.  Most, it seems, do not know how to make a smooth turn right off a roadway and into a parking lot without slowing traffic behind them.

Here, instead, the maneuver involves coming to a near standstill and then gingerly turning every so slowly, forcing the cars behind them to brake and otherwise impeding the flow of traffic and, well, committing a “microaggression” of sorts.

We North Carolinians have adapted though.  We’ve surrendered the entire right lane on many four lane roads to essentially serve as one infinitely long right turn lane pushing all of the through traffic into the left lane, essentially making every roadway one lane in either direction.

This, in effect, defeats the purpose of four lane roads in many places and results in adding more lanes when remedial training on how to make right turns off the roadway would seem far more effective.

But changing cultural idiosyncrasies is more difficult than that.

I haven’t spoken directly to the businesses that complained about necking the four land road through Rockwood into a two lane road with a left turn lane down the center.

But I can bet they fear that driver behavior here when it comes to right turns will create traffic jams, forcing potential customers to take other routes, which would disrupt long established patterns for where they stop to eat or get coffee.

If the project backfires, it won’t be because it didn’t make sense in theory, or that it doesn’t work elsewhere but because it doesn’t make sense for the way most people here choose to drive.

A study should be done one day to find out why a majority of drivers in various states adopt quirky driving habits.

Did Alaska learn to hug the center line in drivers ed?  Did Floridians learn to make right turns from the left lane on the local news?  Did Idahoans master the refusal to come up to speed after turning into traffic purely by observation?”

Are half of all turns in California made without signals because drivers there are clairvoyant?

So there it is.  I am guilty of telling myself a story that different than the other five states in which I have lived, North Carolinians don’t know how to make right turns without impeding traffic behind them and they must be offending me on purpose.

Or maybe I am the one who just committed a “microaggression.”

Seriously, people say and do insensitive or stupid things all the time without being guilty of racism, sexism, ageism or even “right turnism.”  Stereotyping is not always bigotry, but that is where it most often takes root.

But it seems as if being hypersensitive is becoming a distraction from more strategic social evolution.

We seem to spend a lot of time in society now trying to limit or stand up against offense, often at the cost of too much form and not enough substantive change.

Maybe we should worry less about micro or even nano aggressions and insults or how uncomfortable something makes us feel and work more on macro change.

Easy to say when it isn’t your identity that is impacted.

I'll try to remember all of this the next time I find myself muttering along in the right lane while someone, you know, annoys me.

The Revolution Behind Our Revolution

Ideologies evolve.  In a documentary aired a few months ago, a North Carolina conservative spokesman dismissed the participants in Moral Mondays by claiming comparisons with the civil rights movement were laughable.

More sincerely and without revealing any sense of irony, he questioned “those who equate it with the 60s and 50s and some of the great struggles in history,” movements that were opposed by conservatives at the time.

To an Independent like me, it seems ideologies on the right or left tend to make progress in a circular, two steps forward and one step back but usually moving forward.

Two books that I read in 1991 and 1992, shortly after moving to Durham, seem even more relevant today.  One was entitled The United States of Ambition: Politicians, Power, and the Pursuit of Office by journalist Alan Ehrenhalt.

It traced a number of localities as case studies where a relatively few members of an ideology - both on the right and left – were out of step with the general local electorate at the time, but still able to assume power and execute change.

His latest book, The Great Inversion and the Future of the American City, is a particularly good read in light of recent efforts in the North General Assembly to override this progress, including a new effort this week by a powerful state senator to strip away tree ordinances.

The other book I read in the early 1990s is entitled, The Radicalism of the American Revolution, by Dr. Gordon S. Brown.

Packed with citations and statistics, the book makes the argument that what we view as the American Revolution in the narrow sense was really the culmination of more than two decades of social and cultural disruption here.

In fact, the war was in opposition to a conservative effort to turn back those changes.  Following Independence, the founders made a concerted effort to evolve a new, more modern set of social and cultural adhesives to hold the new society together.

Conservative resistance to social and cultural change may go back at least to two thousand BC and the requirement for people to have last names, something more broadly but gradually implemented in the English-speaking world after the Norman invasion of William The Conqueror.

But this was nothing like the reaction to the wholesale changes in the American colonies leading up to the Revolution.  There was a breakdown in vertical social strata among classes.  Wealth was no longer viewed as trickle down.

Land ownership and working for a living became the standard across classes along with rampant land speculation.  The patriarchal family devolved including introduction of divorce laws and inheritance changes.  Hundreds of evangelical religions surfaced.

The population, which doubled in 25 years (six-fold in North Carolina,) included hundreds of thousands of immigrants.  Manners gave way to defiance of authority.  People no longer stayed in place and transience and poverty increased.  No longer did “everyone belong somewhere.”

People began to run for office regardless of their station in life and voting increased.  Entrepreneurism took hold and people began to produce surplus for trade rather than subsistence.  Contracts replaced handshakes.

Gone was the notion held by social conservatives that “only poverty and starvation would induce common people to work.” Hierarchal structure was eaten away or transformed by classical style republicanism which became used as a pejorative much as the label “liberal” has been made today.

In general, there was a radical, two-decade long, counter-cultural desacralization in America that makes the 1960s seem very tame by comparison.

Conservatives responded back then by desperately trying to make it hard to move, harder to vote and run for office and advocating a general return to cultural norms.

This was the period from around 1750 until 1775, a time of great anxiety and change like none other witnessed before or since in such a concentrated span.

As a society we seem to work best when those reluctant about change serve as a soft brake on the pace of change rather than a dogmatic regression.  The genius of the American Revolution set the stage for eventual emancipation and the full extension of equal rights.

The founders did not limit their development of social and cultural adhesives to just government institutions.  They set about through promotion of a liberal arts education to socially re-engineer America, including using utensils to eat, brushing your teeth and not talking loudly in public to name a few.

By the second decade of the 1800s, Americans were “already referring to themselves as a society dominated by the ‘middling” sort’, a term for the middle class.

But the founders were never able to resolve an issue that raised its head almost immediately and still plagues democracy today.  They were unable to protect government for the common good from self-interests which has become overwhelming since the bicentennial of the Revolution in the mid-1970s.

Those who profiteered during the Revolutionary War pushed to see that continued, overwhelming the wishes by the founders to focus government on the collective, common good.

It is painful to read Brown’s account of the debate over special interest group politics, especially in light of its predominance today.  In the lament of President George Washington:

“the few, therefore, who act upon Principles of disinterestedness are comparatively speaking, no more than a drop in the Ocean.”

Today, we’re still locked into what The Economist magazine’s Lexington Blog calls “zero sum politics” where we hear and believe only the worst each political party says about the other:

“the Right has done a fine job of convincing lots of Americans that Democrats are the party for the undeserving poor…The Left, meanwhile, has successfully portrayed Republicans as the party for the heartless rich.”

As an Independent, I just want to rid government of self-interests.  Period.

Different Views of “Fairness”

One of the arguments given by Republicans in North Carolina for new legislation that rolls back “early voting” is to make it more “fair,” because people who voted early tended to favor one political party over another.

Apparently, Democrats were more successful than Republicans at getting voters to vote early and this new law is meant to erase that advantage through power rather than hard work.

Generally, in Republican lexicon, success such as this is the reward for initiative but apparently not when it comes to politics.

Sounds a bit socialist to penalize success and initiative in this way until you look at how differently Democrats (predominately moderate) and Republicans (predominately conservative) view fairness as well as equality.

I’ll explain, but first…

To me, as a moderate Independent, It seems important to bone up on these differences, because even if voters throw out those members of the General Assembly who are clearly sleaze balls, the way voting districts have been draw to their party’s advantage is probably going to guarantee that Republicans are in power for some time to come.

Even if the Independents who brought them to power swing away, the best case scenario is that we can replace sleaze balls with more honorable, thoughtful Republicans in many districts.  And believe me, they do exist.

A role model is Representative Chuck McGrady, a moderate Republican and former Henderson County Commissioner who also served a stint as national president of the Sierra Club.

Moral psychology researcher, ethicist and author of the book The Righteous Mind, Dr. Jonathan Haidt explains the different ways people along the ideological spectrum view what’s fair and what’s not fair.  But he provided a “short course” on these differences a few months ago in a quarterly issue of Democracy, a journal I read to keep abreast of how progressives think.

Don’t panic conservatives!  If anything, he seems to lean right in his book while ideological moderates keep up with thoughtful analysis at all points of the spectrum.

Even more than I remember from reading his book, In the Democracy article, Haidt zeros in more on research about the varying views of what’s “fair.”

There are two views of “fairness;” procedural and distributive (benefits and burdens.)  Democrats and Republicans hold both definitions to heart but Republicans seem a bit hung up on “procedural.”

Thus they can rationalize cutting back on early voting in some areas so it is the same across the board, even though that penalizes early-adopters and innovators in the other party.

It also explains their obsession with photo IDs, even though it is discriminatory to many who vote Democratic and what voter fraud truly exists is in absentee voting, an area where Republicans benefit.

There are two subtypes of distributive “fairness,” equality (everyone gets the same) and  proportionality (all receive rewards in proportion to inputs.)  Democrats, Independents and Republicans all endorse proportionality but those on the left simultaneously endorse equality.

According to Haidt’s research, “the right has no interest in equality for its own sake.  Conservatives prefer proportionality, even when it leads to massive inequalities of outcome.”

To put this in context, this is why Republicans felt comfortable requiring voter IDs but making no concerted effort to help those who have difficulty obtaining one, many because they don’t have birth certificates or there are inconsistencies on their birth certificates, or because they don’t trust the government not to misuse it.

For most Americans, “equality” means a “fair shot.”  To conservatives, however, “fair shot” is procedural, a belief that - “If you work hard, you’ll succeed.  If you don’t, you deserve to fail.”  Unfortunately, some elected officials are special interest “ne’er-do-wells” who seek to rig government as a means to gain success.

Democrats see a “fair shot” as not just procedural, but also a question of distributive fairness.  In my experience, some don’t worry enough about procedural fairness or how much fraud or laziness undermines whether the distribution itself is fairly administered.

In the just published 2013 Economic Values Survey, a majority of Americans believe one of the biggest problems in this country is that we do not give everyone an equal chance.

This includes nearly 69% of Democrats and 54% of Independents but nearly 60% of Republicans and Tea Party members think this really isn’t a problem.

This is a real divide in America and it strikes at the heart of the American Dream.  By ethnicity, white voters are split 47% to 44% on the issue but 77% of black Americans and more than 6-in-10 Hispanic Americans think equal opportunity is a big problem.

Related is that more than half of Americans now don’t believe that hard work and determination are any longer a guarantee of success.  More worrisome is that 56% of Americans, including 63% of whites, 39% of blacks and 36% of Hispanics, now think they can get ahead without working hard and making sacrifices.

Apparently, this includes special interests, lobbyists and elected officials who seek to rig the system in their favor.

Partisan politics aside, for anyone who ran for elected office to truly govern and to represent all of the people, not just self or petty or special interest, this has to be alarming.

If we are going to collaborate across partisan divides, we need to have a dictionary of terms handy.

Gun-Loving, Tree-Hugging, HOG-Driving and Flag-Waving

I love guns, so imagine my surprise last Friday when the Governor of Texas labeled me as among those “who hate guns, hate gun owners.”  It reminded me of a time shortly after I moved to Durham, North Carolina to jumpstart the community’s destination marketing organization.

Part of my job was to defend Durham, which I did every day.  Not long after I got here, I received word from a colleague that a law enforcement official in a nearby county noted that I had best careful if ever traveling through there.  Gulp!

Guns were a part of life where I was born.  I spent my early years on a horse and cattle ranch along the Henry’s Fork on the Idaho side of the Tetons, but it wasn’t my grandfathers or even my rancher father who first taught me to shoot.

They all viewed guns as useful tools around ranch and farmland to protect livestock or occasionally to harvest a head as food, usually including one or two for neighbors or friends.  Occasionally they would hunt with friends, but my father who was a 35th Tank Battalion veteran, always seemed ambivalent about firearms.

It was my substitute 4th grade teacher who first taught me to handle a rifle and enjoy target shooting, along with her son and our mutual best friend.

Similarly, I learned that my proud Roosevelt Democrat great-grandfather would famously stop the school bus he drove for years along the route out to Cedar Fort, Utah and teach the kids how to handle and shoot a rifle.  Earlier in life he had been a sharpshooter atop trains transporting gold from the mines at nearby Mercur.

My brush with a kindler, gentler and far more reasonable and collaborative NRA was while obtaining a marksmanship merit badge on my way to earning Eagle Scout in the years before that organization was hijacked by the gun hardliners.

With all due respect to Governor Perry and the NRA, a lot of people who love guns also believe that more thorough background checks are reasonable and won’t “take them out of the hands of those who use them properly and legally” as he threatens.

Based on the views of my 84-year-old conservative Republican mom who sees the universal background checks as reasonable, maybe the Governor was just playing to the narrative to which his NRA audience has been restricted.

My mom could easily ascertain that the checks were designed not to enable a registry which the legislation prohibited or to stop criminals but to make illicit sales more difficult and illegal trade in firearms easier to trace.  We are both among the 86% of Americans who support the extension of background checks to those buying online and at gun shows.

To be fair, one should listen to the Governor’s speech in context.  He and his audience are equally well-advised to read the now-tabled legislation and its failed bi-partisan amendment rather than rely on paid lobbyists and special interests.

As a political independent, I’m disgusted when people pander to any ideology at the expense of good policy, regardless of their party affiliation or where they fall on the political spectrum.

I lose patience for those who want to make it harder to vote but easier to have firearms.  Or those who want safety-net recipients checked for drug use but want to protect the illicit gun trade or those who resent federal interference but make every attempt to override democracy at the local level.

There are reasonable arguments for all of these each issues but this inconsistency and hypocrisy undermines them.

It is easy to demonize opposing views as many speakers have at the recent NRA event.  To better understand both gun “lovers” and “haters,” I recommend a humorous new book entitled Gun Guys: A Road Trip, by journalist and gun guy Dan Baum.

My gun guy cred is limited to family keepsakes but I found that Baum put a more human face on people involved with guns than does the NRA.  He also gives a much better perspective on views across the ideological spectrum on the issue.

Unfortunately though, it seems that far too many on the right are now making decisions not in the tradition of intellectual curiosity championed by the late William F. Buckley Jr., but on semantics.

A just-published study co-authored by Dr. Rick Larrick at the Duke Fuqua School of Business here in Durham, reveals that many conservatives reject projects marketed as “green” merely because they see it as a liberal agenda.

Really?  Of course, along with being a gun-lover, you can count me as a tree-hugger. While you’re at it count me also a card-carrying, HOG-driving, Eagles-for-Equality, trout-protecting, flag-waving all-American who supports better regulatory management of firearms.