Interview on drug legalization

Here is an interview with a drug policy expert.  He is a big supporter of gradual decriminalization of drug possession, which he feels is the surest way to put drug mafias out of business.  Given recent developments in Colombia, where criminal groups have been diversifying to get into mining, commodity plantations, and many other extractive activities, I am no longer so sure if legalizing drugs will do away with these evil groups.  But it will probably help to weaken them and to improve life for lots of people.

Teletubbies: The gateway drug to consumerism?

I have written in the past about the ethics of marketing junk food (or anything else, for that matter) to kids, and my dismay as a parent that simple, educational books like the Spot series have metastasized into consumer-goods empires.  Here is an article about the (lack of) educational merits of Teletubbies, and the dangerous ground PBS began to tread when it decided to take on a heavily-marketed, non-educational show targeted at preverbal children.  I know Teletubbies is old news by now, and I'm sure things have evolved since this article was written, but the questions it raises seem to me to be still pertinent.

Iditarod Arctic race

An old friend of mine was good enough to pass me this long article on the Iditarod dogsled race through the Arctic.  It reminded him of my father, a fan of Jack London who would recite Robert Service's poem The Cremation of Sam McGee on cold nights at our family's summer house.  The article is interesting, though a bit too cutely self-conscious (as seems to be the wont among my generation of writers, myself included).  It makes me marvel at the lonely, wide wilderness of the Arctic, which for me, as I believe for my father, seems a romantic place to think and read about, though nowhere I've much desire to actually go to and endure.  I'm all for wild places, but my tastes tend toward the controlled, humanized wilderness of places like Wisconsin, and better yet, humanized wilderness in more tropical climes like Africa and Colombia.

And a bit on the development of the modern poultry industry

Following up on yesterday's look at China's industrial pigs, here is an article on the industrialization of chicken production in the 1950s USA.

The environmental and social implications of China's pig industry

Here's an article that looks in depth at the structure of China's pig production and consumption, and the implications that aspect of the food system has for China's environment, workers, farmers, and society in general.

Peace and peasants in Colombia

I feel that the tide of peace is rising in Colombia.  Recently there was a nationwide march for peace that brought in all social, economic, and political sectors.  Here are some photos of my town's schoolkids marching.

There was also a display to commemorate many of the people of Boyacá who've died in various ways related to the conflict.

The peace talks between the government and the FARC continue apace in Cuba, and I've heard that the ELN, Colombia's other major remaining guerrilla group, also wants to participate.  Despite attempts by people like ex-president Uribe to derail a lasting peace, the Colombian society seems determined in their commitment to ending the war.  I am very hopeful about all of this.

Related to the issue of peace in Colombia, here is an article from the Economist about the legal framework that exists for creating peasant reserves in Colombia, and some of the difficulties and questions that such reserves raise.

Also more distantly related to the theme of running a society justly and well is that in the past few weeks the Colombian government has been talking about re-nationalizing healthcare.  As is, there is a public system for the poor, and everyone else is required to pay for insurance from a private provider.  These insurance companies then subcontract up the wazoo, such that between the person actually giving you a checkup and the person you pay, there are about a million intermediaries taking a cut.  Our particular health insurer isn't too bad, though we do often run into bureaucratic inefficiencies.  But regardless of how good or bad a given private company might be, I see no reason why public health should be entrusted to the private sector.  I welcome this change, and I feel that it is one more example of a common-sense, post-partisan logic taking effect in Colombian governance.  Normally private sector incursions into public services become a drawn-out, polemical issue of Right vs. Left, but that is silly--it's just common sense to have fewer middlemen between a government and its people in service sectors of primary need like health, roads, and food. 

And I close with a short documentary about peasant agriculture in the Cauca region of southern Colombia.

Articles on the USA in a new global order

Here is an article from the World Policy Institute blog about how the world has changed economically and politically, such that the US must adjust to a role different from its traditional position as isolated from and on top of the rest of the world.  The article expands on and relates to a prior article by the same author on the revitalization of the economy in rural and industrial Middle America.  Lastly, a short bit on last year's Summit of the Americas in Cartagena, Colombia, also points to the US's declining influence in Latin America.

The Road

Last year during a visit, my mother gave me the book The Road by Cormac McCarthy.  I had never gotten around to reading it, but a few days ago I picked it up.  I devoured the book in two sittings.  Its terse prose and sentence fragments are initially offputting, but they, along with the inconsistent punctuation, add to the sense of a world unhinged, a world where grammatical propriety is irrelevant, and even thinking in complete sentences is a needless luxury.  The book tells the story of a father and his son in a post-Apocalyptic setting of the southern US.  We’re never clearly told what happened to end civilization, but there are inklings of nuclear holocaust, and then butchery and madness among the few survivors.  The landscape is totally burned and barren, and the sky is permanently greyed by soot, smoke, and dust. 

On a purely technical note, this burned-over, blackened setting is a very plausible way for the author to force his characters an existence based entirely on scavenging.  If there were sunlight or surviving flora and fauna, human life could go on indefinitely through hunting and gathering or even planting.  But McCarthy creates a world where there is no wildlife, and thus any humans must live by scavenging the jetsam of industrial society—canned goods, fruit that fell to the ground and dried up, metal and tools for non-food needs, and among the particularly evil, the flesh of other humans.  For a guy like me who fancies that he’d be okay if civilization ended as long as he could sow and gather and hunt, this brave new world is really terrifying.  There is a finality to everything—what humans remain are fated to gradually dwindle as they scavenge the steadily-decreasing pool of whatever canned goods they can find, and there is no foreseeable hope for a future reflourishing of the natural world.  The Road takes place in a totally ruined planet.

Beyond the skillful sci-fi positing of a plausible Apocalyptic situation, the book speaks directly to the relationship between father and son.  The main adult character is driven by an all-encompassing, overwhelming love for his son, but their maleness and the harsh conditions they live in leave little room for tenderness.  Even in our less extreme, pre-Apocalyptic world, I think any father can understand the friction between wanting to pour out love and tenderness, and the social norms that demand we maintain some hardness to ourselves and our sons.  In the book the most extreme manifestation of the difficulties of fatherhood and love is the father’s constant questioning about hope and the future for his son.  Should he keep on moving, living, giving life to his son, or is it cruel to maintain hope and life when the world seems to offer no justification for either?  The father’s final words to his son before dying are, “I know.  I’m sorry.  You have my whole heart.  You always did.  You’re the best guy.  You always were.  If I’m not here you can still talk to me.  You can talk to me and I’ll talk to you.  You’ll see.”  There is an eloquence, or at least an uncanny, heartrending sincerity, to the clumsiness and simplicity of these words.  These are heartfelt words of love between father and son.

Another point I related to particularly was the father’s attempting to raise his son with the values and the referents of a world that no longer exists, and which in fact the son never knew.  Is reading important when there are no more books and no leisure to read them?  What can the son understand of summer or plants or fashion or cities when none of them exist anymore, and when his only knowledge of them comes from his father’s stories?  Often as I raise my son outside of my birthplace, I find myself feeling similar things.  I tell Sammy about growing up in 1990s Chicago, about different music and sports and current events and cultural norms, but sometimes all these things seem so far away that my telling of them is like a fairy tale.

I am really touched, even thrown off of my normal routine, after having read The Road.  The night I finished it I went teary-eyed into my son’s room, pulled up his covers to keep him warm, and then crawled into bed next to my wife, happy to be alive and to have them alive and to live in a world that still hasn’t quite gone over the edge.  I appreciate the little comforts of modern life after reading about a hypothetical world where they no longer exist—my hot shower, my garden, good food, a working, living city around me.  My son and I have been butting heads a bit recently as he asserts his growing independence, struggles to communicate as he learns to string together words, and perhaps most of all worries about how having a new sibling will affect our love for him.  Again, this is part of the normal tension that’s always there between father and son, but after reading The Road and thinking about all the awful things that could befall us but that thankfully haven’t, I can’t stay mad at him for too long.

I am also reminded that I need to get our house prepared for an emergency.  I’m not talking about getting a .30/.06 rifle, laying in twenty years’ worth of provisions, and taking survivalist classes.  No, just the typicalrecommendations for any family, exposed very wittily in this zombie-themedcommunique from the Centers for Disease Control.  Now that we’ve finally got our house rehabbed and settled and in order, it would be good to put by a few months’ worth of rice, lentils, vegetable seeds, water, first aid supplies, etc.  In our case, I’d want to prepare for taking care of needs for some twenty people—we’ve got a big extended family!

For now though, I think it’s important to leave The Road behind me.  You can get really depressed thinking about the end of the world in such vivid, real terms.  The big reading project that I’ve taken on for Sammy and especially his unborn sibling is the Odyssey.  This is another one about the love between father and son in the midst of difficulty and distance.

Hard questions and easy answers about the pope

This is an article detailing a Catholic reporter's investigation of some murky areas of Pope Francis's past, namely how he handled a few sexual abuse scandals, and his role in Argentina's Dirty War.  According to the article, Francis had little to do with (and no authority over) the sex abusing priests, and has no firmly registered political position dating from the Dirty War years.  I don't know much about the Pope's record, and in fact I hardly even know what his detractors are saying.  The reporter's account seems well-researched and frank, though on the other hand his attitude and his professional affiliation (with a Catholic newspaper) don't give the impression of a totally objective observer but rather someone who just wants to confirm his positive impression of the pope.  I hope he's right in his assessment of Francis as a consistently decent, moral, honest man with no major blemish or misstep in his record, though the answers to the reporter's hard questions seem unexpectedly easy.

Interesting articles from the Guardian

Here is a well-thought article detailing the differing visions (positive and negative) of peasant agriculture.  It refers to a new report from the World Economic Forum, which I have not yet read but intend to.

This other article describes a very unique initiative by the government of Bhutan to convert all its agriculture to organic farming.  In a mountainous country with complex peasant agriculture and natural limitations to large-scale, industrialized farming, this may be a very smart move.  Time will tell.

Another expat on being an expat

Here is an article from a Finnish woman who lives in India, reflecting on the perks and disadvantages of living as an expatriate.  Her situation is fairly different from mine (I don't live that geographically or culturally far away from my country of birth, my current home is my wife's country of birth, and we tend not to make big moves that frequently), but some of her points hit home for me.

Book banning controversy in Chicago

Here is a short bit on a controversial measure to remove a certain book from the reading curriculum at Chicago Public Schools.  When students found out about this, they created an uproar.  It seems that my alma mater high school, Lane Tech, played a major role in the whole affair, as it was a Lane student reporter that first brought the story to light, and Lane students were the ones that protested the loudest.  I'm proud of those kids for making their voice heard.

An actual working vertical farm

Here is an interesting video and article about a company that is taking urban indoor farming beyond its pie-in-the-sky roots and actually implementing working, profitable systems.  I applaud them for this.  The only thing is that, while the vegetables produced are classed as organic because they use no synthetic chemical inputs, I don't imagine this system could be considered very sustainable.  It is entirely dependent on electric pumps to provide an aerosol spray for plant roots, and electric lights for plants to grow under.  There is apparently no sunlight, no ecosystem processes involved.  I guess it's what might be called "synthetic organic" or something to that effect.

Third World Green Daddy 48: Life as a family

Last week was the first time in a long time, perhaps in my life,  that I left work and came home to my family.  In the past, I had never had a legit, long-term job and a family living with me at the same time.  This was a big event, and a wonderful feeling to finish a good day's work and look forward eagerly to seeing my wife and child. 

Three weeks ago my wife and my son came to live in our small town for the first time in almost two years.  She has worked out a work-from-home arrangement with her job, so they timed their homecoming to coincide with Holy Week vacations.  Hence that first week we were reunited I didn't go to work, and we spent much of the time organizing various logistical things for their new living arrangement in our town.

Another activity that occupied a good part of our vacations was a trip to my father-in-law's farm.  It had been months since we'd last visited; since Caro and I lived apart, our precious weekends together were usually spent traveling between Bogota and our town, and we were usually too tired to make the many-hour journey to the farm on top of all that travel.  But now, living as a family in our house, it was no longer difficult to drive together to the farm, and I believe that for the next few months we will go there every other weekend or so, like a summer cottage.  This is especially the case as I am still in the process of organizing a parcel that I intend to plant to coffee.

Starting on our vacation week and continuing to the present, I've also become closer to Sam, my son.  He and I have always gotten along, and when we have been together I've spent a lot of time with him.  But it was always an adjustment for him to spend the week without me, and then to have Dad around on the weekend.  There were certain things he usually preferred to do with his mother as opposed to me, like going to the bathroom or eating.  I always felt bad not to be able to help with these things, especially as my wife was always so tired from her work. 

These past weeks though, Sam has become accustomed to having me around, and sometimes even prefers to do certain things with me and not Caro.  I feel happy to be closer to him, and happy to contribute more to our family's household functioning.  It is a big change though to be totally attentive and responsible to Sam now, as opposed to before when I had to abdicate many responsibilities because he wouldn't let me do things for him.

As for my job, I have been noticeably less interested and motivated now that I know the two people I most want to be around are nearby.  This is aided by the fact that we're wrapping up a big project now, so things are not as fascinating and inspiring as when we were in the thick of fieldwork.  At any rate, many an afternoon I have found myself just wanting to get home to see my family.  I'm sure this sloth of mine will improve as I get more used to having them around.

Another big change contingent upon our recent restructuring is that Sam is in a new preschool (incidentally the same school his mother and his cousin went to in their day).  Caro and her mother thought it would be very traumatic for him, but he has adjusted well, and really looks forward to going to school every day.  Even the school uniform, which is a new requirement that was absent in his more free-form school in Bogota, hasn't bothered him much.  It is a navy blue sweatsuit on Tuesdays and Fridays, and a navy blue blazer with tartan checkered pants the other days, both with the school's little crest on the chest.  He puts up some resistence to getting dressed in the morning, but then he doesn't want to take off his uniform at bedtime!

Anyway, with the new school as with many things in parenting, I think Sam is much more adaptable and resilient than the adults around him.  We as parents often fear changes much more than our kids do, and it's important not to project our own fears and neuroses onto children that don't yet have them. 

On the topic of fear, Sam and Caro recently watched the movie "Finding Nemo".  Caro says it was a traumatic experience--the movie opens with the main character's mother getting killed, which prompted my son to cry disconsolately.  Just when Caro was trying to calm Sam by telling him that surely everything would work out okay, the little fish lost his father, and the rest of the movie heaped tragedy upon tragedy.  They never got through with it, because Sam was so shaken up.  I normally try not to shield my child from the harsh realities of life, and indeed many children's tales deal with loss and tragedy as seen by kids.  But on the other hand, I don't want to traumatize my son.  I don't know where the healthy midpoint is between shielding kids from reality and exposing them to issues they're not yet ready to take on.

One last new development is that we are also expecting another child which, not yet knowing its gender, we refer to alternately as "Frijolita", "Poopies", or "Twillbe".  Up until now I haven't even really digested this bit of news, as our frantic, hectic situation of living apart kept my mind busy with other things.  But again, now that Caro and I are under the same roof and our life has assumed a slightly more tranquil rhythm, I've started to think more about this new baby.  I'm not as nervous as with Sam, and frankly we're not doing much special preparation beyond prenatal checkups and vitamins and such.  We've already got many of the necessary accoutrements from Sam's infancy, so there isn't a lot of shopping to be done.  But I don't want to be complacent or neglectful, either.  I am making a point to try to talk to and read to the new fetus, just as we did with Sam.  At this point we've only just started the D'Aulaires' book of Greek myths, which is really excellent (though obviously the new baby can't see the wondeful illustrations).  It's not easy to make time for the baby with Sam running about and demanding attention, and it's a challenge to coordinate the things I want to read to Sam with things I intend for the baby.  But we're muddling our way through. 

As Caro, Sam, Frijolita, and I spend more time together in our cozy house, I hope this muddling will gradually evolve into a more harmonic, organized setup.

Strikes and transport

Recently my town experienced a general strike by bus drivers, who were incensed at an unfair law.  The mayor's office, taking the cue of a university study, decided that the best way to fight congestion and pollution in the city would be to subject public transit vehicles to restrictions as to the days they could circulate.  In my town, as in many others in Colombia, "public" transit is actually run by private companies.  Each company runs buses along certain routes.  The model has thus far worked fairly well--you never wait long for a bus, you pay less than a dollar for a ride, and you can get just about anywhere in the city without transferring.  And because of the private nature of the bus companies, you can be sure that the mayor's claim of an "oversupply" of public transit (the first time I'd ever heard such an argument) was total nonsense, at least as far as economic logic was concerned.  I likewise never heard any public transit users, myself included, complaining about the generally short wait for any bus to come along.

But this wasn't good enough for the mayor's office or the university study, and presumably neither for the bourgeois urban elites that seem to be behind most of the stupidest, regressive urban decrees whose only raison d'etre seems to be to make Colombian cities look less like Third World cities with a large underclass, and more like polished European burgs.  (Such laws have long tried to phase out the use of horse-drawn recycling carts in Bogota and many other cities).  So our town made a rule that buses with a given license plate number would be prohibited from circulating one or two days a week.  This rule did not apply to taxis or private drivers, which meant that it would have targeted only the means of transport that serves the poor, and it wouldn't have taken the biggest contributors to congestion off the streets (just think about it--one small bus takes up about the same space as a car, but it carries a lot more people).

So the bus drivers protested, demanding that the one-day-a-week restrictions affect everyone equally, taxis and private cars as well as buses.  They paralyzed traffic for a few days, and eventually won out.  The mayor wisely and fairly decreed that the driving restriction should affect everyone.  For me, this was a well-directed protest; the drivers weren't asking to avoid making sacrifices and contributing their share to improving life in the city (and I must admit that the streets are much less congested now since the measure took effect).  They were just demanding that we all make the same sacrifices.

This is very different from a series of protests by taxi and bus drivers a few years ago.  That time the protests were over the high price of gasoline, which the Colombian government taxes heavily.  This protest reminded me of the worst currents in modern US politics--a small group, or even the entire polity, demanding measures that favor them in the short term but that harm us all in the end.  In my eyes, the Colombian government does well to keep gas expensive, and its policies must have something to do with the fact that every Colombian city and town I've been to is very well-served by public transport.  So in this case, the government was enacting a wise policy (that the US would do well to imitate), but short-sighted individuals were protesting against it, refusing to make sacrifices to benefit us all.

Aside from whether I agree or not with the specific cause, I do lament the general use of de facto popular force to achieve political ends in Colombia.  Very often the response of people here who feel unjustly treated is to take to the streets and alter the functioning of everyday life.  Recently employees at the National University shut down operations for almost a month as they requested a pay raise.  Their cause was just, but the means they used meant that a group of about 500 people prevented tens of thousands of students from attending classes (many of whom live in Bogota apartments that their parents from the provinces must make a big sacrifice to pay for), sunk numerous scientific experiments when researchers couldn't access their labs to maintain animals and microbe cultures, and generally wrought havoc on the nation's chief center of research and learning.  Student protests shut down the university I work at at least once every semester.  In the case of the gas price protest a few years ago, all of my city was blocked off.  No one could get in or out, because the taxis had blocked all the roads.  In all of these cases, a minority held hostage the general population in order to achieve their goal.  While such actions are usually the only viable means that the protesters see available to them in the face of an unfair assault on their rights, they end up becoming little dictators themselves, using force to subjugate everyone around them to their agenda.

In the case of the (unsuccessful) gas price protest a few years ago, the only upside was an odd, interesting ghost town feel to my city.  Since cars couldn't circulate, the streets were devoid of their general racket, and pedestrians walked in the middle of the street without worry.  It was a vision of a post-car world, and reminded me of scenes I've scene of the Montgomery bus boycott.  Everyone on foot, a sense of a shared situation, a solidarity to it all.  Caro was happy not to have buses zooming around, and while I understand the sentiment, I realize that noisy, unpleasant buses are an integral part of a sustainable, pedestrian-friendly city.

A measured look at genetic engineering

Here is a piece from Mark Bittman a propos of a recent rider that got signed into law that would partially shield genetically-engineered crops from judicial and USDA oversight.  He gives a measured, polemic-free accounting of what transgenic crops have and have not offered the world in the past twenty years.  The verdict, as I've discussed before, is that as yet transgenics have not compared favorably to conventional breeding in terms of increasing crop yield in return for low research investments.

Interview with James Baldwin

This is an interview with James Baldwin, I believe from 1984.  I have only read a few little things by Baldwin, but I greatly admire him as a writer and especially as a thinker and proclaimer of truths.  This interview hit me like a speeding train, imbued as it is throughout with the color of exile and expatriation.  There are two passages that perfectly describe feelings I've had for years but could never quite explain precisely.  The first deals with Baldwin's perception of the self-centeredness of white America. 

• INTERVIEWER
  You read contemporary novels out of a sense of responsibility?
  
  BALDWIN
  In a way. At any rate, few novelists interest me—which has nothing to do with their values. I find most of them too remote for me. The world of John Updike, for instance, does not impinge on my world. On the other hand, the world of John Cheever did engage me. Obviously, I’m not making a very significant judgment about Updike. It’s entirely subjective, what I’m saying. In the main, the concerns of most white Americans (to use that phrase) are boring, and terribly, terribly self-centered. In the worst sense. Everything is contingent, of course, on what you take yourself to be.
  
  INTERVIEWER
  Are you suggesting they are less concerned, somehow, with social injustice?
  
  BALDWIN
  No, no, you see, I don’t want to make that kind of dichotomy. I’m not asking that anybody get on picket lines or take positions. That is entirely a private matter. What I’m saying has to do with the concept of the self, and the nature of self-indulgence which seems to me to be terribly strangling, and so limited it finally becomes sterile.
  

In my case, I do not necessarily stress the whiteness of the US's navel-gazing--indeed, black US culture and many black people I know are hideously self-centered, too.  But the essential divide between self-centered, frivolous people, and people who try to think beyond themselves, is for me a very important issue in the United States, and it played a big part in my own decision to leave the country.

The second passage is about an expatriate's enduring love for his own country, warts and all:

• INTERVIEWER
  Yes, before 1968, you said, “I love America.”
  
  BALDWIN
  Long before then. I still do, though that feeling has changed in the face of it. I think that it is a spiritual disaster to pretend that one doesn’t love one’s country. You may disapprove of it, you may be forced to leave it, you may live your whole life as a battle, yet I don’t think you can escape it. There isn’t any other place to go—you don’t pull up your roots and put them down someplace else. At least not in a single lifetime, or, if you do, you’ll be aware of precisely what it means, knowing that your real roots are always elsewhere. If you try to pretend you don’t see the immediate reality that formed you I think you’ll go blind.

Aside from these two passages, which when I read them caused in me an effect between catharsis and naming a long-held, unconscious belief, the interview is full of insights as to the writing process, and what it is to be a writer.  I can relate to many of the feelings Baldwin describes on this count, because I've gone through the same thing many times in writing my blog.  And I just write about my own life and my own thoughts.  I have never even been able to imagine summoning the discipline and bravery and initiative to write fiction.  It's hard enough just writing a bit of nonsense from time to time about the movies my kid watches or my impressions of an agricultural development report!

Interesting writing from Beverly Bell

Here is a very clear, farmer-angle view of a few of the problems inherent in our modern food system.  It is matter-of-fact, agronomically sound, and lacking in the heavy-handed ideology and dogma that often creep into debates on sustainable food.

This excerpt is from a book by journalist Beverly Bell called Harvesting Justice.  I haven't read it yet, but I plan to.  If you want an idea of what the book's about, and a brief, concise description of the concept of food sovereignty, read this blog.

Another book she's linked to on her website is about striving for a zero-waste regimen, which is to say eliminating landfills and incineration for garbage by reducing and recycling the waste generated by our modern lifestyle.  Again, I haven't read it, but it's on my queue.

Punishment

                My wife recently read an article about a retired military man and his family in Colombia, who for many years kept a young girl from a rural area as their personal slave.  One of the family’s daughters, after living for years with the anguishing knowledge that what her beloved family was doing was gravely wrong, finally spoke up about it.  Now the couple has been judged guilty on charges of slavery, the first such legal decision of its kind in Colombia for a practice that my wifeimagines was relatively common in the recent past (and still exists in other countries that are in the earlier stages of the agrarian-urban transition, like Haiti), despite the news coverage's insistence on characterizing the case as "aberrant".  In the case at hand, the couple received a rural family’s daughter as a “favor”, and assured them that the child would receive all the benefits of an urban, wealthy upbringing.  Instead she worked from dawn to dusk and beyond, every day for her entire childhood, cleaning the house, making food, and getting sexually abused by the father and his brothers.  The child was beaten if she did her work in a way that the family didn’t like, and was severely punished when she began to teach herself how to read.

                At any rate, it seems that good prevailed in this case, and the conscientious daughter did the right thing (though it cost her the hatred and estrangement of the rest of the family).  The parents must now pay economic and moral reparations (the latter consisting in putting the slave girl back in touch with her real family, and the former in back pay for all those years of work).  My limited understanding of the Colombian legal system and general mentality gives me the impression that such punishments are common.  Even in cases of war crimes and such, the sentence for the perpetrator often focuses on the idea of reparation of wrongs done, as opposed to receiving sheer punishment or suffering in return for a crime.  This is probably for the better—a country at war cannot afford to add more brutality into the mix by harsh, nasty sentencing for offenders, and righting wrongs is more effective than vengeance to achieve a lasting peace.  And I would never advocate the arbitrary, counterproductive penal system of the USA, where petty drug offenders get brutalized by hardened prisoners, while the stuffed suits that brought down our entire economy receive a slap on the wrist.

                Still though, in a case like this my Puritan US roots make me wonder if reparation is the right tack.  Personally I’d like to see these slaveowners made to suffer.  They robbed a girl of her youth, of her humanity, of her very body and sexual organs.  If it were up to me, they’d be sent to a brutal US-style prison to be anally raped with broom handles and razor blades and other such objects.  Justice should not usually be about making an example of people, but in this case, as in the many cases of impunity and brash abuse that plague Colombia, I’d like to see a clear statement that these things won’t be tolerated.  All too often I feel that the worst people, doing the worst things, are then judged lightly by generally open-minded, forgiving souls, and so other bad eggs get the idea that they can get away with things like massacres, embezzling, paramilitary violence, and now even slavery. 

I do not necessarily believe that only bad people do bad things.  But this is all the more reason for severity, at least in certain emblematic cases.  If we are all indeed capable of such monstrosities, then brute fear of punishment has an important role to play in keeping our worst demons in line.

Third World Green Daddy 47: Kid movies

I have mentioned before that we now have Netflix in Colombia, and that the selection of grown-up films is not always that great.  But there are a lot of kid movies, and so we've acquired the custom of watching a movie with Sam on Sundays or other lazy days we have free.

This has been perhaps Sam's most important exposure thus far to moving images on a screen.  He's always watched the occasional show or soccer game when he's in his sister's or his cousin's room, but we never leave him in front of a TV screen for too long, and until recently he hasn't had the patience to sit down and watch for long stretches.  But seeing an almost two-hour movie every week or every few days represents a lot of consumption for him at this point.  I don't feel bad about it--if the stats are correct, even if Sam saw 4 hours of TV in a week, that would be about what the average two-year-old in Chicago or Bogota watches in a day or two, and his movie watching is commercial-free and accompanied by his parents.

Another thing I like about Sam's movie-watching is that it's divorced from the whole media and advertising circus that normally accompanies kid movies and shows.  By watching movies that are already a few years old, and with no commercials, Sam sees just the movie.  There are no promotional tie-ins with McDonald's, no must-have toys, no spin-off TV shows.  In fact, thus far many of the movies we've watched sort of fizzled in their day.  Hercules, The Emperor's New Groove, and Atlantis are Disney movies that I don't believe ever matched the glory and success of a Little Mermaid or Lion King.  The Incredibles, Up, and the Princess and the Frog seem to me (removed as I've been from the popular pulse) like they had more success at the box office, but at any rate, Sam never saw any of the hype (though he has a doll of the Incredibles that some other kid left at our house once!).  We've also seen some Dreamworks movies, both successful and lesser-known, like Madagascar (which my wife thought was silly and boring), the Road to El Dorado, and Prince of Egypt.  And even some films not put out by these two big studios:  an independent, odd-looking one called the Legend of Sasquatch, and a Nickelodeon movie called Barnyard.

I tend to see only bits and pieces of these movies, since our long-distance living situation means I'm not around long enough for a full-length screening.  I like the more epic, sincere ones like The Road to El Dorado and even Up.  Barnyard was okay, though I couldn't believe that the filmmakers insisted on putting full-size udders on the bulls that are the main characters.  I don't know if it was laziness or ignorance, but you'd think that a movie about an animal farm would at least get right this simple anatomical detail.  The movies I don't at all like are the sarcastic, tongue-in-cheek ones.  It seems that at some point kid movie makers got caught up in the general cynicism and cowardly coolness of modern culture, and decided that making genuine, honest movies with integrity was too square.  So they started filling kid movies with adult jokes, sarcasm, and pop-culture references.  I believe Shrek started this trend; while in and of itself it was still a good kid movie, it laid the groundwork for direct spinoffs like Puss in Boots (which starts with a tomcat waking up from a one-night stand and sneaking out on his bit of pussy, and maintains that kind of inappropriate, stupid tone throughout), and competing films that tried to be even more acerbic and ironic.  The Emperor's New Groove seems to be the low point of this trend.  It is chock-full of a whiny, sarcastic, bitchy David Spade (has he ever played any other type of role?) being so clever that the character and the film are totally uninteresting for any audience, child or adult.  (Incidentally, check out the sordid back-story on the making of this movie here.)

In summary, a perk I've discovered to living outside of the US and in general outside of a wealthy country with an over-developed, integrated media machine is that we can avoid some of the pre-consumerist addictive behavior that the media circus injects into young kids.  For now at least, Sam isn't insisting on Hercules clothes, or a Pocahontas backpack, or an Up-themed birthday party.  Hell, the poor kid doesn't even know Mickey's name, because I insist on referring to him as "Generic Animated Mouse"!

On another note, we recently had our first run-in with gun play.  Sam and his cousin Mariana were playing with blocks, and they started making gun sounds and pointing them at one another.  My wife and I are both zero-tolerance on this:  both in Chicago and in Colombia, there is enough gun violence already, and it's no game.  I intend to show Sam how to use a real firearm when he's a bit older, but I don't intend to ever have toy guns in our house.  On this occasion it was easy to defuse the situation by suggesting the kids pretend their blocks were airplanes.  But for next time, I had our live-in adolescent Carlos (who is studying industrial design) make some swords out of cardboard.  I'd prefer Sam doesn't pretend to play with any lethal object, but if he insists, a medieval sword seems less immediately dangerous than a modern-day gun.

Another worthy cause

My friend Chidi is organizing another Indiegogo fundraising campaign, this time with a much more immediate impact than my research project had.  His campaign will help one high-achieving student from a low-income background to attend university (or two students, if they can get the funds together).  This is one example of the type of direct help to worthy young people that we need to replicate all over Chicago and other cities in the US in order to close the gap in wealth and opportunities that plagues our nation.  Helping such students ultimately benefits all of us, for they may have insights into fields like marine biology or psychology that will make life better for someone we know.  This is perhaps the biggest loss that the US or any nation suffers from economic inequality--so many promising, brilliant young people never get the chance to contribute to improving life for the rest of us, because they aren't given the chance to thrive.  By contributing to this campaign, you can assure that at least one student will be given that chance.