Smeared Type

by Nancy Werking Poling

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Looking at me, a short older woman with curly hair and red glasses, you probably wouldn’t guess that I’m dangerous.

For one thing I like Europe. I like its efficient transportation systems with comfortable express trains crisscrossing the continent. Less pollution, less hassle.

And there’s the Continent’s medical system. In Great Britain the clinic charged nothing to treat my shingles. When I came down with a strep infection in Poland, the doctor apologized for charging me the equivalent of thirteen dollars, my not being a European and all. A friend tells of having spent three days in a Swedish hospital and getting excellent care for $7000. (A three-day stay in an L.A. hospital cost my insurance company over $20,000 for a wrong diagnosis, and that didn’t include doctor fees.)

I guess I should have tried harder to find evidence that Europeans lack the freedoms I enjoy. Yes, our Dutch and German friends pay higher taxes and their homes are smaller, but I came away envying their quality of life.

I’ve been hearing on TV that my fondness for Things European means I’m a socialist. And that makes me a danger to America.

Of course the fact that I’ve been to Europe puts me among The Elite. I’ve been hearing on TV that The Elite think they’re superior to other people and better qualified to run their lives. I’m not sure what people I’m supposed to think I’m superior to, only that I’m a danger to America.

The nature of my worries also poses a threat. I’m concerned about people who work hard for low wages and can’t pay their heating bill, can’t afford a reliable car to get them to work. I want government to issue food stamps and extend unemployment benefits to help my neighbors get through these hard economic times.

Such an opinion promotes class warfare, I’ve heard on TV. And that makes me a danger to America.

I worry about the water, the food, the air my grandchildren breathe. I want someone, an expert, to monitor these things. I want the power plants whose emissions pass over head not to contain mercury or other harmful gases.

I worry about the mountains surrounding the town where I live. I should be content to let business have free rein over exploiting the coal and timber. But no, I want resources removed responsibly so the mountains’ beauty will remain for future generations.

My appreciation for Europe; a desire for government to help people during hard times; a wish for assurance that the air, the water, the mountains are protected from pollution and exploitation.

All that, I hear, makes me a danger to America.

Nancy Werking Poling is author of Had Eve Come First and Jonah Been a Woman and Out of the Pumpkin Shell, both available where books are sold.

by Nancy Werking Poling

Image via Wikipedia

Young women, is there any chance you’ll listen to a little old lady who has trouble managing the functions of her cell phone and whose fashion style is dictated by comfort?

Like you I once worked all day, came home to fix dinner (often frozen fish sticks and French fries), broke up the kids’ fights, and enforced the number of hours they could watch TV. When the evening news came on, I was often in heated argument over homework versus another hour of playing outside. My reading included escape novels, books on parenting, and women’s magazines, like Family Circle and Ladies Home Journal.

But age is a teacher. As events unfold we learn what we should have paid attention to, what we should have ignored. I have learned the importance of keeping up with events beyond workplace and household.

Even after 1920, when American women gained the right to vote, many depended on fathers or husbands to make informed political decisions. The notion of men are rational and women are emotional pervaded the political scene. Hence, until recently men occupied all the seats of our national and state legislatures, as well as our courts. Even today women are minimally represented.

Nowadays people are saying, “I’m so fed up with politicians I don’t pay any attention to the news anymore.” Women dare not take that risk. Where money goes, who’s accountable, what’s cut from the budget and what’s retained—these issues impact us directly. Are courts siding with women in issues related to sexual and domestic violence? Discrimination in the workplace? Are women’s reproductive rights being threatened? Will our children be less able to compete in the future job market given cuts in education?

Don’t assume, young women, that just because you have more opportunities than your mother and your grandmother that your future is secure.

Here’s what you can do:

1)     Google topics such as “current women’s issues” and “child advocacy.” LinkedIn and Facebook have groups that share information.

2)     Learn as much as you can about the issue(s). Read a variety of viewpoints, not just articles that support your opinion.

3)     Avoid sound bytes. Their intent is to sway you without giving you adequate information. Read or listen to in-depth coverage. Question easy solutions.

4)     Cast an informed vote.

Something else I’ve learned over the years: Women can’t depend on men to know what’s in our interest.

Nancy Werking Poling is author of  HAD EVE COME FIRST AND JONAH BEEN A WOMAN  and  OUT OF THE PUMPKIN SHELL.

by Nancy Werking Poling

Image via Wikipedia

author of Had Eve Come First and Jonah Been a Woman

and Out of the Pumpkin Shell

I think it was the Grinch who lately complained about the requests for contributions that social services agencies send through the mail this time of year. Why, here we are still recovering from the pressure of really important problems: what tech gadget to buy Cousin Robert, the newest toy fads to put under the tree for Justin and Hannah, and what to give the grandmother whose needs are few. Then in the mail come these pesky reminders of our community’s needs.

Without such mailings my husband and I might forget to put a check in an envelope so the MANNA Food Bank can feed our hungry neighbors, Helpmate can provide a safe place for battered women and children, and Habitat for Humanity can build homes for families. Ours are modest contributions, but such donations add up.

We’re still in the season of good will—not that good will should be limited to the weeks around Christmas. Especially during these difficult economic times, I encourage readers, even if you’ve thrown the envelopes away, to make a donation to one or more of the many worthwhile agencies making a difference in your community.

by Nancy Werking Poling

author of Had Eve Come First and Jonah Been a Woman

and Out of the Pumpkin Shell

Should a network decide to feature my daily life in a reality show—yes, it would bore most viewers. But there would be additional hurdles. A man who hates women could complain that I’m too ordinary. The public needs to see emasculating women, he might say, ones who beat their children, too. A young woman starting a career might also find fault in my ordinariness. The public needs to see older female managers who have clawed their way to the top and terrorize those who work under them.

True, I do not represent the total nature of womanhood.

The problem with All-American Muslim, according to the Florida Family Association, a Christian organization, is that the Muslim families featured in the TV show “appear to be ordinary folks.” Florida Family criticizes the show for “excluding many Islamic believers whose agenda poses a clear and present danger to liberties and traditional values that the majority of Americans cherish.”

Ordinary folks, I take it, are those who defy the stereotypes of the dominant culture. They’re intelligent, hard-working. They struggle with how to raise their children, make a living, buy a house.

Growing up in the racially segregated South, I attended all-white schools. I accepted white generalizations about blacks: they were lazy, violent, and undeserving of the good education I had access to. Only as I learned to know ordinary African Americans, did I understand the harm such a limited perspective inflicts on a whole group and of the wasted intellect and creativity that might have benefitted the wider society.

Our country has gone through periods in which the dominant culture labeled all Irish as dirty and lazy, Jews as money-grabbing, Indians as savages. When we remove ordinary people from a grouping, we give ourselves reason to take away their rights, ghettoize them, terrorize them. Only when we learn to know ordinary Irish, indigenous peoples, Jews, Muslims, and homosexuals can we see our shared humanity.

I can’t help but consider the logic of wanting a TV series to include radical, militant Islamists. What if it were Christian families a reality show was featuring? Should it include members of the Ku Klux Klan? They claim to be Christians. Would we include Christians who feel justified in killing doctors who perform abortions?

I hope ordinary Christians would be featured: good-hearted fundamentalists and progressives, the Free-Will Baptists and the Unitarians.

by Nancy Werking Poling

Image by IdaStewie via Flickr

Let’s see if I’ve got this straight. Our country’s leaders are REALLY worried about our children’s and grandchildren’s future. Hence the appointment of the Supercommittee, twelve experts in matters of money. There’s only one woman, though historically women have been responsible for making sure families are fed and clothed, and are, hence, experts at stretching a limited amount of money. But I digress. This committee of very intelligent and experienced people was appointed because we don’t want to pass a national debt—is it 14, 15, trillion dollars?—on to our children and grandchildren. The GOP website states, “If nothing is done, our generation will have the sad legacy of being the first to lower the standard of living of the next generation” (http://www.gop.gov/policy-news/10/08/24/the-next-generations-debt-burden).

While I certainly want to relieve my children and grandchildren of the heavy burden of repaying this debt, what good is it if they have money but lack the following?

1)     Clean air to breath and clear water to drink. Yet we hear calls for dismantling the Environmental Protection Agency. How quickly we’ve forgotten the Deepwater Horizon Oil Spill of 2010, Massey Energy’s 60,000 violations of the Clean Water Act within a six year period. Republican legislators oppose efforts to prevent oil-fired power plants from emitting dangerous toxins into the air. Regulations, they say, cost jobs.

2)     A safe food supply and access to basic medical care. Yet Republicans are calling for the repeal of Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act and trying to weaken the power of the FDA and the Department of Agriculture.

3)     A solid education that will allow them to become leaders in ingenuity and production. Yet pledges not to increase taxes are forcing teacher layoffs, denying schools the resources they need for effective teaching, making increased class size necessary.

4)     An understanding of what the song, “America the Beautiful,” refers to. Yet deforestation and mountaintop removal for coal—which, yes, provide jobs—destroy our nation’s beauty. There are calls for the privatization of our national parks. Who will stop businesses, whose goal is profitability, from opening parks to logging and mining interests, then walking away when resources have been depleted?

If we are truly concerned about our children’s and grandchildren’s future, let’s bequeath them a quality of life, a “standard of living,” that insures health and learning. Let’s leave them a country that is beautiful from “sea to shining sea.”

Nancy Werking Poling  is author of Had Eve Come First and Jonah Been a Woman and Out of the Pumpkin Shell.

by Nancy Werking Poling

author of Had Eve Come First and Jonah Been a Woman

and Out of the Pumpkin Shell

Before Archie Bunker came along we Americans pretty much kept dumb thoughts to ourselves. But in 1971 he entered our living rooms, and for twelve years viewers laughed at his diatribes against blacks, women, and foreigners. Were he on TV today he would surely vent about our mixed-race President and Mexicans illegally crossing the border. He was a man who had an opinion about everything, with little regard for the facts.

As negative and blustering as Archie was, the show’s mostly white audience came to love him. Maybe that was because, like many of us, outside his home he had little power or influence. In the 1970s women and blacks were challenging white male privilege. A new generation, represented by Archie’s son-in-law, was upsetting the old codes of morality. Archie wanted the world to be like the one he’d grown up in. Many white Americans felt the same way.

Now we hear that Rick Perry and Michelle Bachmann are admired because they “tell it like it is,” “say what needs to be said.” Sometimes, like when they support broad generalizations with pseudo-facts, they sound a lot like Archie. My concern, however, is not that they sound like him but that they’re using fear and a sense of powerlessness to turn decent hard-working Americans into Archie Bunkers.

This is an effective approach for reaching my generation. The rapidly changing technology and shifting morals leave many of us feeling out of the American mainstream. Republicans have long exploited this discomfort and stoked the fires of fear—fear of gays, immigrants, blacks, Muslims. Especially fear of government, how big it is, how powerless the individual is by comparison. Yes, we potential Archie Bunkers stand before them, frightened of a future bearing little resemblance to the world we grew up in.

Instead of those who appeal to the Archie Bunker in us, we need leaders who nurture our noblest qualities: compassion, generosity, an openness to new ideas. Leaders who can unite young and old, black and white, foreign born and native born.

May our decency prevail!

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So you’ve got an auditorium full of Republicans,and at the mention of Texas executing 234 inmates during the Perry governorship, the audience applauds. I know why. Republicans haven’t been reading enough fiction. Reading fiction, researchers are learning, promotes empathy

(http://www.yorku./mar/Mar%20et%20al%202009_reading%20fiction%20and%20empathy.pdf).

What I don’t get is how these same people talk about “the sanctity of life” when discussing a barely formed fetus, while a man wrongly convicted and executed gets no sympathy. Nor does the woman who killed her abusive husband. Nor does the man who suffered from schizophrenia and spent his adult life in homeless shelters and in a fit of anger choked someone to death.

What would happen if these Republicans started reading more fiction? Charles Dickens, for example: his characters in debtors’ prison, the young orphans. In The Curiosity Shop, the orphaned Nell must become a beggar; her only friend Kit is falsely accused of theft by the money-grabbing Quilp. Who can read that story and not feel empathy for the characters and contemporary people who suffer the same fate? And what if Republicans read about the life of Celie in The Color Purple? The Joads in The Grapes of Wrath? I imagine throngs of them rushing to work in the inner city, buying groceries for the unemployed, voting to extend Medicaid to all who need it, building homes for the homeless.

So what are we Progressives to do? If Republicans will not come to fiction, we must take it to them. Outside the debate venues we can pass out novels. Are there any suggestions as to which ones?

Meanwhile, I will respond to my own personal calling: writing fiction.

Nancy Werking Poling is author of Had Eve Come First and Jonah Been a Woman and Out of the Pumpkin Shell.

Image via Wikipedia

by Nancy Werking Poling,

author of Had Eve Come First and Jonah Been a Woman

and Out of the Pumpkin Shell

So it’s a cool morning, and being retired, I haven’t gone to work but am sitting on the front porch in my hickory rocker, reading the newspaper. A calming experience were it not for yet another article about possible cuts in Medicare and Medicaid. “We must not borrow against future generations,” a congressman says.

The Boomers are to blame, we hear, those born between 1946 and 1964. So many, and what with all the costs of Medicare and Social Security. Those Hippies, the kids in college during the 60s, they’re the ones responsible for the breakdown of American values. Now they expect the next generation to pay for them to play golf and take cruises?

Indeed, thanks to the Higher Education Act of 1965, more students than ever before attended college during the 60s. The federal government pumped money into scholarships and low-interest student loans, as well as into the universities themselves.

Yet those of us fortunate enough to attend college during the 60s tend to forget that most Boomers were not able to take advantage of the new resources. Instead, young men who weren’t in college (a disproportion of them black or Hispanic), and hence unable to get a deferment, were drafted to fight in Vietnam. The majority of young people struggled to gain personal independence, working in home and highway construction, as secretaries, as telephone operators, in factories. These Boomers felt lucky to have enough money to buy a home, set aside a little in a savings account for a rainy day. They did not have extra money to invest in the stock market or in 401Ks. For many of them no employers contributed to a pension fund.

Listen to Eric Cantor rant against wealthy Americans paying higher taxes, and you’ll hear his accusation that it’s all an effort “to incite class warfare.” He’s talking about rich-poor warfare. But consider Rick Perry saying that Social Security “is a Ponzi scheme for … young people. The idea that they’re working and paying into Social Security today, that the current program is going to be there for them, is a lie. It is a monstrous lie on this generation, and we can’t do that to them.”

Perry’s remarks are indeed inciting warfare: between the generations. Having spent two semesters in South Korea, I’ve witnessed the respect Korean young people show their elders, the genuineness of concern for their parents’ and grandparents’ comfort. But in the U.S. Rick Perry and other leaders are telling young people that Boomers are the enemy, that our generation has done nothing to earn respect and a retirement free of want.

All the while Perry and others forget that they are among the more fortunate Boomers: those with university degrees, law degrees, MBAs. They have had money to invest. When they retire they’ll receive government pensions. They don’t need Social Security or Medicare.

In 2008 the median household income for persons over 65 was $30,774, while that of younger households was $56,000   (http://aging.senate.gov/crs/aging25.pdf ). That same year, 3.7 million Americans over the age of 65 had incomes below the federal poverty level, that is below $10,326 (http://www.ncpssm.org/ss_senior_income/). Many senior citizens depend on Social Security and Medicare. They have no choice.

I don’t deny that there will be strains on the federal budget as Boomers reach retirement age. I wish I could offer a solution about where funding is to come from, but I can’t. I only ask that those who want to lead our country consider the ramifications of their rhetoric. Let them model the respect that is due the generation that helped build the economy to where it was before the recession: those who have worked in assembly lines, built our highways, driven the trucks that transported goods, cleaned the office buildings, stocked grocery shelves.

Yes, let all of us model respect.

Image by jeremy.wilburn via Flickr

by Nancy Werking Poling

author of  Had Eve Come First and Jonah Been a Woman

and Out of the Pumpkin Shell

So why am I not surprised when I read of legislators cutting funds to education?

It used to be that a well educated person was held in esteem. We believed the findings of science; we valued the informed opinions of –ologists. We wanted a populace capable of making informed decisions, leaders who were intelligent. Nowadays we hear, “Yeah, they say eating a lot of red meat is unhealthy, but my granddaddy ate beef his whole life, and he lived to be a hundred.” “Those scientists who warn about global warming—there are just as many saying there’s no crisis.” “Nobody will ever convince me that God didn’t create the earth and everything on it in seven days.” In the last presidential election I heard voters say they liked Sarah Palin because she was “just like you and me,” that is not smarter than most of us.

In the current cultural climate we see the extreme to which the power of the individual has been taken. It doesn’t matter what years of research have shown; if I don’t want to believe the theory of evolution, all I have to do is say it’s not true. If the coal industry, which contributed to my senator’s reelection campaign, says global warming is a myth, and I want to drive a Hummer and run my air conditioning, I maintain global warming hasn’t been proved. I want to believe that cutting federal spending will stimulate the economy, so don’t confuse me with facts that show otherwise. If a T.V. channel tells me what I want to hear, I repeat what I heard there and swear it to be the truth.

No wonder American children don’t do well in science: their parents don’t believe the scientific facts that are out there. Back in the early eighties, when I worked as an editor at a textbook company, Melvin and Norma Gabler, religious conservatives in Texas, held an inordinate influence over textbook publications. Our company’s biology books didn’t mention evolution; our junior high health books didn’t mention puberty. For decades many students have been inadvertently taught not to think scientifically and not to accept scientific evidence.

Yet, even for those of us who don’t intend to adopt science as a vocation, a sound scientific background is important. It informs our gathering of new knowledge. We try to approach a subject/problem—even if it’s related to economics, the environment, or forging strong communities—in an unbiased manner, gather evidence that can be measured and replicated by someone else, develop hypotheses, test them.

And now conservative legislators are cutting education. Who cares what educational research says about class size? What does it matter if “American students rank 21^st in science compared to students in 30 industrialized countries”? What does it matter if “more than 1.2 million students drop out of school every year”? What does it matter if “44 percent of dropouts under the age of 24 are jobless” (broadeducation.org/about/crisis_stats.html)?

Money is also being pulled from our public universities. That’s not surprising either, given a widely held opinion that colleges and universities harbor left-leaning, socialist faculties. My personal interpretation is that universities foster critical thinking. The more a person studies a problem, and thinks critically, the more complexity the learner sees. Issues are no longer clear-cut, no longer answered with simple solutions and platitudes. If one exiting the university questions commonly accepted practices, is that leftist thinking?

We used to say we wanted an informed citizenry. I’m convinced conservatives in our country, fueled by money from corporations, want individuals to believe that their own opinion, which has been manipulated, is more sound than science.

Withholding money from education is sure to result in a citizenry no longer influenced by careful, unbiased research. “Don’t confuse us with the facts,” might well become our national mantra.

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by Nancy Werking    Poling,

author of Had Eve Come First and Jonah Been a Woman

and Out of the Pumpkin Shell

I daresay that politicians making decisions about Medicaid, Medicare, and Social Security are unfamiliar with the lives of those who daily provide them with services necessary for their comfortable life: the stock man at the grocery story, the woman who cleans their home, the Mexican dishwasher at their favorite restaurant, the Korean couple who washes and irons their shirts, the single mother who delivers The Washington Post to their door before she gets the children off to school and goes to a second job.

Maybe it’s living in the South where folks seem freer to tell you their story. Maybe in retirement I take more time to notice those whose work makes my life easier. It could be I’m more aware because small-town living doesn’t separate the classes the way urban living does.

Last winter a neighbor borrowed our snow shovel. She planned to buy one the next time she got paid. Tears welled in the eyes of the young man installing our kitchen cabinets, as he told me he had thirty-five dollars to his name when he got a refund on the double-wide trailer home that made his son sick. With the help of a neighbor out of work and the generosity of others, who gave him plumbing fixtures and kitchen cabinets, he was able to build a three-bedroom house for $25,000.

A few weeks ago two veterans in their late fifties, who have temporary housing at the nearby Veterans facility, were grateful for the work when we hired them to build a stairway up the steep bank behind our house. Our neighbor’s decision to build a wooden fence employed two men whose construction business had gone bust. All around our community men and women will perform any odd job for meager pay.

And there are the immigrants. The young Vietnamese couple who run the local nail spa work six and a half days a week. The young Mexican man who keeps his tiny store open every day gets up at 3:00 a.m. three mornings a week to drive to Atlanta for fresh fruits and vegetables.

My financial future, as a retiree, feels uncertain right now, yet I can’t help but worry about these people who have not had extra money to put into a retirement plan, whose employers provide no benefits, who cannot afford health insurance. (Imagine the people I’ve described paying $680 a month for Medicare and supplemental health insurance, as my husband and I do.) I see sixty-year-old waitresses, sixty-year-old men doing strenuous manual labor. How will they survive when their bodies can no longer maintain this effort?

Entitlement programs, we call Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid, often inferring that people who have worked hard feel unduly entitled to money they have not earned. Those who stand all day, carry heavy loads, and in other ways physically tax their bodies deserve no less than I the right to adequate housing, food, and medical care in their later years.