I have a piece up at NJ Spotlight today asking the question: Are gun buyback programs effective.
Author: hankkalet
Hank Kalet is a poet and freelance journalist. He is the economic needs reporter for NJ Spotlight, teaches journalism at Rutgers University and writing at Middlesex County College and Brookdale Community College. He writes a semi-monthly column for the Progressive Populist. He is a lifelong fan of the New York Mets and New York Knicks, drinks too much coffee and attends as many Bruce Springsteen concerts as his meager finances will allow. He lives in South Brunswick with his wife Annie.
Change the language, change perception
The Associated Press released this update to its Stylebook today, which should have a longterm impact on the way we view the undocumented workforce. (This is from an email update.)
illegal immigration
Entering or residing in a country in violation of civil or criminal law. Except in direct quotes essential to the story, use illegal only to refer to an action, not a person: illegal immigration, but not illegal immigrant. Acceptable variations include living in or entering a country illegally or without legal permission.
Except in direct quotations, do not use the terms illegal alien, an illegal, illegals or undocumented.
Do not describe people as violating immigration laws without attribution.
Specify wherever possible how someone entered the country illegally and from where. Crossed the border? Overstayed a visa? What nationality?
People who were brought into the country as children should not be described as having immigrated illegally. For people granted a temporary right to remain in the U.S. under the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program, use temporary resident status, with details on the program lower in the story.
Simply put, what we name things matters. If we continue to refer to the undocumented as illegal, we attach the lawbreaker stigma to 11 million men, women and children whose only crime (for most of them) was skirting an inefficient and ineffective immigration system.
Human beings, as the immigrant movement has been making clear for years, cannot be illegal. We need to stop referring to them in that way.
Grassroots: Homelessness is a byproduct of corporate capitalism
I wrote this piece, which runs in the current issue of The Progressive Populist, the weekend after the hearing in Ocean County that produced a deal that should lead to the end of Tent City, with housing for its residents. The essay offers my view that homelessness is more than just an issue of housing; it is an outgrowth of the systemic failures of corporate capitalism.
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Alice in Wonderland on The WaPo opinion page
Jackson Diehl has a message for those of us who were right about the Iraq War: You may have been right but you still wrong.
If that sounds like a bit of Alice-in-Wonderland logic, it is. Diehl’s argument is that the war turned out badly, but we remained the indispensible nation in the region. “U.S. influence in the Middle East remained strong,” he said, but only if you ignore the facts on the ground. The Arab Spring, in many ways, was a reaction to the U.S. approach to the region and there are now fewer governments who are friendly to U.S. interests than before we entered Iraq guns ablaze.
But it is the critics of the war — those of us who said months before the March 2003 invasion that we were courting disaster by even talking about war — who have failed to learn its lessons. Diehl wants a more assertive intervention in the Syrian civil war; failure to intervene on at least a Clintonian model (with U.S. air power backing others’ troops), he says, would be to cede leadership. Already, he says “every neighbor of Syria has been shocked and awed by the failure of U.S. leadership.”
Every neighbor? Look at the map. Iran borders Syria and we know where they stand. Then aside from Israel and Turkey, there are not a lot of neighbors who consider themselves steadfast U.S. allies. And Turkey has its own very specific interests to worry about (the Kurds). The other neighbors — Lebanon, Iraq, Egypt, Jordan — are unlikely to seek out American intervention because it will only inflame core constituencies who remain angry at America’s meddling in the region. So who wants intervention?
The column is typical of the kind of approach used by former war supporters to rehabilitate themselves and paint the original critics as out of touch. It fails the test of logical argument because it cherry-picks evidence. The U.S. intervention was successful in rooting out al Qaeda from Iraq, he says, while ignoring the fact that al Qaeda was not a presence in the country until after the American invasion.
The U.S., he also writes, “triggered the transformation of Iraq, quickly disposing of the old regime and buffering the subsequent sectarian struggle.” What followed the fall of Saddam was a particularly nasty civil war that flared for several years and that continues to smolder and undermine stability in Iraq. It also did more than “prompt low-level meddling” by Iran; it led to an Iraqi government that tilts toward Iran.
Diehl and his colleagues were wrong about Iraq in 2003. They were wrong in the years that followed and they continue to be wrong today. We need to stop taking these guys seriously.
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Running to freedom
No matter how strenuously we fight it, age always wins the battle. The years accumulate on the body like body blows to a boxer, eventually beating out the stamina, the strength and the will. Few boxers can withstand the repeated pounding and they ultimately fade.
Most of us do not have to bare the body blows, not literally anyway. But the wear and tear of everyday existence has the same effect. We age and the cumulative stresses take their toll, so that we ache more than we’d like to admit and the things we did as younger adults — drink into the night, play basketball, go for a run — require significantly more time for healing.
We do battle with the years — or many of us attempt to — and yet the years always win. We change our diet, exercise, take various pills, but our bodies have a limited life-span. The body always reasserts its will, always has the final say.
I turned 50 in October. I have lived more years to date than I likely have left. And as I look back over this sentence — the use of the word “likely” to describe what is ahead, its wishful, pleading sense — I realize that I’ve tried to qualify the aging process, to wish away the reality of aching bones and a body that is showing its wear and tear. This wishfulness is, at base, the reason I go to the gym. It is the reason I run, or try to — to extend myself, to attempt to gain for my physical being an extended warranty of sorts. It is an effort to extend the life of the physical vessel.
And yet, there is something more to the running. There was a point when I ran for no other reason than it was what I did. It became a central element in my conception of myself; as much as I was a husband and brother and uncle, as much as I was a poet and journalist, I was a runner. I still think this way, even if I have not shown the same commitment that I did five years ago when I was training to run the 18-mile Long Beach Island run.
Mark Rowlands, the Welsh philosopher, is philosophical about running. In a discussion on Philosophy Bites, he divides running into four philosophical stages. The first is the “embodied self”:
When you get to my age, you are either injured or you are about to be injured, so as the run starts off I am sort of a fully embodied self and my attention is keenly tuned to anything that might go wrong.
This is the physical stage — when you notice the ache in the knee, the hamstring, the calf. This is the place where I find myself living these days. I have become keenly aware of the injuries and the aches — in particular, the repeated strain or pull in my left calf, in the medial gastrocnemius. It is a sharp, stabbing pain and it takes days to heal.
When I was younger, and I only mean eight to 10 years ago, my runs would start out in the physical realm but quickly move on to what Rowlands describes as the Cartesian stage, a stage controlled by the mind. The body becomes the mind’s slave, Rowlands says, and the mind uses an array of tricks to get the body to respond. It is both conscious and subconscious, but it allows us to run through discomfort and exhaustion to reach the next point — the next corner, the next mile marker, the next utility pole — and then continue. The mind, Rowlands says, is duplicitous, is firmly in control.
The third stage — what he calls the Humian phase, after the philosopher David Hume — is connected to this second stage, but is far less frontal lobe in its workings. Where the second phase is concerned with short-term goals and planning, this stage is much less directed. It is the equivalent of automatic writing.
The fourth stage, however, seems key to understanding the runner’s mindset, to understanding why we continue forward even when the reasons pile up and we probably should stop. He described his experience running a marathon a number of years ago. He’d been injured in the weeks leading up and had not had time to do the kind of necessary training. He was, he said, “undercooked.” At about the 14th mile-marker, he began to fade badly.
It occurred to me that there was no reason to stop. I could take all the reasons: You know, the sort of brutal, physical unpleasantness of the whole thing, the pain and the aches and so on. I could take all these reasons that I had to stop, and they were quite good ones really, and I could put them together and allow them to congeal into a dark persuasive mass. But still, they couldn’t make me stop. The reasons had no authority over me. Which is very like Sartre’s view of freedom. We’re free to the extent that our reasons have no authority over us.
Essentially, reasons are excuses. They come from the mind. They are rationales that can make us do things or not do things. But, he says — and this is the key point, I think — “there are reasons and there are causes.” The cause is the real injury. It is the thing that, he says, “deposit” the runner “on the tarmac in a second.” But absent these “causes,” we exert our freedom by acting independently of the reasons we have for doing or not doing things. To continue running despite the pain and aches, to push on despite the growing list of reasons he had to stop, was to demonstrate his freedom.
Having achieved this realization in the past, I can tell you it is intoxicating. To be free in this way is to be free of one’s body, to almost be pure mind.
And yet, it is an illusory freedom, as any runner — and anyone who has had to live with their own physical limitations — can tell you. The physical is always there, always imposing limits. So while the runner may achieve this kind of freedom for a moment, he still has to be able to distinguish between reasons and causes. He has to know whether he is just using his pain as an excuse or whether that pain is signaling to him something more pernicious. It is something that becomes more difficult as we get older.
When I hurt my right calf a few weeks back, I ran through the pain. I finished by three miles, but the injury kept me from running for two weeks. I used the elliptical, which mimics the running motion without the pounding, but the did not get back onto the treadmill until yesterday when I set out for another three miles. The injury had not healed — in fact, I re-injured it — and I now face another idle stretch.
What I think this shows is that the differences between Rowlands’ reasons and his causes can change and do change with time. What may have been pure rationalization when I was younger, just an excuse to stop, has become something more, something potentially problematic. What was a trick of the mind is now a very real demand of the body that must be acknowledged.
In the end, we have no choice but to acknowledge the limitations our bodies impose on us, to recognize that these limitations may become greater as we get older. Running now has become a reminder of limitations, of the physical nature of existence, of the fact that there is an expiration date on our bodies. A scary thought, perhaps, but it is something from which we cannot escape.
Running is something I do because I want to and not because I need to — even if I may need to do it on some level to take off weight and address impending health issues. I run regardless of all of this because, no matter how much effort I put in, I know that I will never be able to escape the impact of Father Time. So I run because I want to, despite all of the reasons both for and against my doing so. Rowlands might say that this is an extension of the fourth stage. To do something just to do it, because we want to and not because we must, is to get to its intrinsic value, to find the absolute freedom in the effort.
