Stories from LA

I’m in the process of switching this blog over to a self-hosted word press blog. I might even start writing in it regularly.

So you know, under construction, blah, blah, content coming soon, blah, blah. Etc.

I commute 60 miles round trip on days when I go to campus. I’m pretty careful about avoiding the times with the worst traffic, but it still works out to somewhere between an hour and a half and two hours in the car. Lately I’ve decided I’m sick and tired of the selection of CDs I have stored in the sidepocket of my door (don’t bother breaking into my car, they’re almost all CDRs from emusic, and I have weird taste) so I’ve switched to radio. It turns out, though, that there aren’t that many stations that I like that actually come in consistently all the way from Altadena to Westwood. So I’ve settled on KROQ. They advertise themselves as the “World famous KROQ” and “LA and O.C.’s only new rock.” I can only conclude from the latter that rock is dead, or at least half dead. Large quantities of the music that gets played regularly is stuff I know from high school. The DJs seem to have a particular penchant for the black Metallica album. I imagine if you listened more regularly than I do it would only take about a week to hear the whole damn album. (The heavy play might be attributable to last year’s live album but I’ve heard songs that don’t appear to be on that album so it doesn’t explain it all). To put this in perspective, if I had had a kid when I was listening to that album obsessively, that kid would now be older than I was then. Add to this the fact that they play a lot of Green Day and Smashing Pumpkins and Red Hot Chili peppers and I started to suspect that their main demographic wasn’t 16 year olds but rather 20- and 30- somethings nostalgic for when they were 16. Of course this suggests that I have no clue whatsoever what “kids these days” listen to. But I’m ok with that. [Read more →]

Yesterday’s LA Times has an article about the effects of police efforts to curb crime in the part of downtown known as skid row. The claim is that since last fall when LAPD increased the number of officers in the area and put an effort into reducing crime downtown the homeless in skid row have migrated to other areas of the city, particularly those accessible by bus. This apparently is putting a large strain on the service providers to the west and south of downtown. Arguably, “cleaning up” downtown is a positive thing. A close friend used to live in the loft building on the corner of 4th and Main, which borders on skid row. It was a scary neighborhood. And I say that as someone with a pretty high neighborhood tolerance. Nonetheless, despite thinking that downtown could benefit a lot by a reduction in crime, I’m not at all heartened by the LAPD strategy. Nor do I find the dispersing effect it seems to have surprising.

I do find this story amusing in a sort of tragically ironic sort of way. I haven’t been in LA long enough to make claims with any certainty about the reasons for the existence of skid row. However, from what I have seen, it seems that part of the process has involved “cleaning up” other areas of the city and pushing the most vulnerable towards downtown. It appears to me that many homeless have migrated downtown as they have been pushed out of places like the part of Hollywood near the Hollywood & Highland complex (home to the kodak theatre). Hand in hand with the cleaning up of other neighborhoods comes the dumping, done by hospitals, service organizations, and LAPD itself, of homeless individuals into skid row. The friend who used to live in the area was pretty convinced that the city was happy to just shove all the problems into skid row and forget about them.

Needless to say, this is not an effective way to address the problem of homelessness. One service provider characterizes the strategy as “the leaf-blower mentality” asserting that increasing police activity without increasing housing and other services is just going to move the population around without changing anything. Enforcing laws against sleeping on the street in an area that is essentially a city of tents and cardboard boxes at night is a laughably simplistic way of dealing with the problem. The same can be said for increasing the number of drug-related arrests. Both possibilities are simply bandaids over gaping wounds.

That said I do feel a bit of sympathy for those in the police force having to make decisions about how to deal with skid row. No matter what LAPD chooses to do, they aren’t actually going to have much effect on the very serious problem of homelessness in this city. There is nothing, really, that LAPD can do aside from trying to deal with the crime in the area. Though I will note that the logic of this quote threw me: “Officials said they expected the police presence would lead to more arrests but not reduce the overall homeless population, which they said is benefiting from safer streets.”

In the end this isn’t a problem that’s going to go away until we a) have sufficient affordable housing and b) deal with the systematic factors that are associated with the particular challenges (such as substance abuse) that homeless individuals are so likely to be dealing with. We do an extremely lousy job in this country of dealing with mental health issues (not to mention a lousy job of dealing with physical health issues for the poor). And we do a lousy job of providing services for veterans. And honestly, though I don’t have citations on hand to back me up, I think these two factors are a huge part of the trends in homelessness. In the meantime I don’t much like the idea of a homeless ghetto (which is really what skid row is/was) but I don’t think that dispersing people away from the biggest concentration of homeless services in the city is a dramatically better idea.

Just as a note I intend to start writing here more. I also am going to be doing some messing around with the template and such so things may periodically be a bit strange.
First up I’m going to try to figure out how to get rid of the “read more of [post title]” note on posts like this that are short enough that I’m not bothering to cut them. If anyone has hints, let me know.

Last week’s Economist has a book review of Philip Legrain’s Immigrants: Your Country Needs Them. As I understand it Legrain argues that immigration does not do economic harm to receiving countries and is highly economically beneficial for sending countries. The reviewer jumps off from Legrain’s economic analysis to talk about the intersection of anti-immigrant sentiments and racism. In the U.S. most low-skilled immigrants (and I think this is the relevant group to be thinking about since it seems that most of the anti-immigrant sentiment focuses on this group) are non-white. The same is not true in the U.K. where the addition of poorer countries to the EU has lead to an influx of lesser skilled immigrants from Poland and elsewhere. The reviewer contrasts the lack of protest about the incorporation of European immigrants to the reception of muslim immigrants.

In the U.S. the rhetoric around immigration (particularly undocumented immigration) focuses heavily on the effect that they have on our economy and society. They take our jobs. They lower our wages. They leach off our social services that our tax dollars pay for. The evidence suggests that these effects are either entirely non-existent or at the least significantly less strong effects than lots of immigration opponents seem to think. Still, these sorts of images are used to reinforce exclusionary politics. And as The Economist points, racism will likely continue to drive immigration policy in rich countries for the foreseeable future.

So I could take a stand here and rail against the racist hate-mongers who drive these policies of anti-immigrant-who-is-other but the problem of bigotry is an interesting one because eventually you realize that there are a lot of people living in glass houses. A few days ago I pulled into the parking structure at UCLA and noticed a truck with a bumper sticker that displayed the word Kansas in big letters and then in smaller ones underneath “as bigoted as you think.” This strikes me as a pretty typical liberal holier than thou attitude. I have a number of acquaintances all too ready to hold court on what’s the matter with not just Kansas, but the entirety of the midwest. Apparently bigotry is just fine as long as it’s aimed toward “red-necks.” I’m not sure that I have an erudite commentary that would coherently link these two threads of thought. But I am quite convinced that they are linked, that unchallenged denigration of “other” is no more acceptable from the urban coastal elite than it is from the middle of the country. Moreover I remain unconvinced that Kansas (by which I mean any of the “red” states) is particularly more bigoted than anywhere else. Southern California isn’t precisely a uniform tableau of tolerance. There is, perhaps, a more heterogeneous set of hatred here than elsewhere but I’m not quite sure that I’m confident enough in the material my house is constructed of to be throwing stones at others.

I’m not sure how much news coverage this is getting outside of Wisconsin. But this morning John Klang, the principal of the Weston school district, was shot by a student. Klang was ultimately taken to University Hospital in Madison and died this afternoon at 3:30. A fifteen year old student came into the school with a shotgun and a concealed handgun. A janitor got the shotgun away from him but when the student appeared to be pulling another gun out of his pocket both the janitor and the teacher who were in the hall at the time took cover. The principal confronted the student and was shot three times while struggling to disarm him (which ultimately he apparently succeeded in doing).

I graduated from Weston ten years ago. Klang wasn’t principal yet but he had been on the school board for years. His three kids were quite a bit younger than me but we were on the same school bus route, so I knew them reasonably well. I also knew the janitor who wrestled the gun away from the kid. He was a janitor when I was still a student. And he worked with my father while my father was still a janitor at the high school (a position he left when I was 14).

I’ve been reading the news coverage. I feel a detached sense of grief and horror. I haven’t been back to the school in years. I don’t keep in contact with anyone in the area except my parents. I always felt like an outsider there. And I was. My parents moved there when I was a toddler. They’re happy there and fit in well enough but they aren’t strongly tied to the community. Still it is the place where I spent almost my entire childhood (certainly all of it that I remember). So this feels tragic and shocking in precisely the way things feel tragic and shocking when they hit close to home (literally, in this case).

I am shocked because it is always shocking when tragedy strikes. But I am not shocked that it happened in rural Wisconsin. The same things happen in rural Wisconsin as anywhere else. There’s drugs. There’s violence. There are weapons. All of it is on a smaller scale because there are so many fewer people. Although I suppose it’s worth noting that per capita weapon ownership is probably highest in rural areas.

I am sad about John Klang’s death. My heart goes out to his family, to his children who are adults now but who I will always remember as the children I knew on the school bus. I have the utmost respect for the janitor who acted so quickly to try to disarm the student.

I am full of anger and grief. Of course some of that grief is related to the death itself, but most of it is grief over the way our society fails large groups of children. When I heard the news I thought of my fellow classmates at Weston when I was there. I thought of the troubled angry outcasts struggling to deal with bad family situations, failure in school, ostracization. Often all three at the same time. I thought of the students I had actually been afraid of. And I thought of the ones who were intensely lost in their own pain but nonetheless sweet souls.

I look at the pictures of the shooter. He’s just a kid. He’s 15. My senior year there were a couple of eighth graders who used to hang out in the band room during their study hall, which overlapped with my lunch hour. I knew them both well. They were sweet boys but intense and sometimes prone to deep anger. One was in foster care and had a string of discipline issues following him. The other mostly stayed out of trouble but you could see clouds of trouble in his eyes, nonetheless. I thought about the two of them this morning when I heard the news because I imagined that the shooter might not be all that different from either of them. I’ll admit I wasn’t surprised when stories this afternoon identified him as a special ed student (Weston shunts all the students with discipline problems into special ed, which I think sometimes only causes them to feel more isolated). And while I was deeply saddened, I was not surprised to find that he was a victim of child abuse.

I’ve known too many children in situations that no child should have to bear. And it breaks my heart to think about the long-lasting effects those situations have. How does a fifteen year old child reach the point where they show up at school with a shotgun and a pistol? Inevitably these sorts of incidents lead to a condemnation of the media. And I won’t argue that there is no effect of violence in movies, TV, and video games on children’s behavior. But I think those effects are utterly and completely trivial compared to the effects of physical and emotional violence in children’s day-to-day lives. Of course the questions that will be asked in the wake of this is how we can be sure that children are safe in school. Perhaps greater security in schools will be proposed. How many people will ask how we can be sure that children are safe in their homes? How many people will ask what sort of emotional support and mental health care this child had after his father was charged with felony child abuse and allowed no unsupervised visits for a year and a half?

I have read a number of comments various places that essentially come down to “what is wrong with people?” In most cases that blame seems directed toward the shooter. It’s sort of a “what is wrong with kids these days?” sentiment. And while I can understand that thought process, it’s not where my mind goes first. The first though that comes to my mind is “how did we manage to fail these children so completely?”

Once upon a time I was an idealistic undergrad with great intellectual curiosity who longed to spend her life in the academic realm. At the time I hate the term “ivory tower.” I hated the people who implied that academics were locked away from the world and clueless about the lives of real people. I have since changed my mind. I still think the common sense vs. book smart distinction that comes up so often in anti-intellectual critiques is a crock of shit. But frankly, I can’t argue with the tower metaphor. Not all academics are clueless about the reality of the world, of course. But enough are that if you invoke the broad-brush generalization I no longer feel any need to correct you. Perhaps the problem is less pronounced among less elite academics. But that poses little threat to the ivory tower image since the “ivory” part implies the very eliteness of the institutions in question. My experience is with academics in the big research universities. Indeed my experience is with academics in the big research universities who study inequality. And I will say without batting an eye that in nearly all cases they have absolutely no clue whatsoever what it is really like to be outside the realm of the well-educated elite.

Don’t get me wrong. I don’t claim the problem is limited to intellectuals employed in the academic domain. Arguably the vast majority of the world’s economically privileged have no real clue what it’s like not to hold that privilege. Indeed, the vast majority of the world’s privileged have no clue whatsoever what it might be like not to hold whatever aspect of privilege it is they hold. So why do I feel a bit betrayed that the academic elite, taken as a group, seems to have no clue what it is like to be a have-not? Simply because I think they should know better. In particular I mean that if you are a sociologist or an economist who studies families, or inequality, or really anything other than the white upper-middle class, you really ought to have some clue about the subject at hand. I don’t mean you should be able to volley around statistics. I mean you should be able to bend your mind in such a way that you can actually see what life is like. And the image you get should not be some sort of Picasso-esque distorted tangle in which your frame of reference is the only right one and everything else is seen as inferior or weird. Apparently I was foolish to think that the research community as a whole had moved significantly away from the old anthropology attitude of studying the curiously strange native.

My first year of graduate school I took a class on forms of capital. We studied human capital, social capital, and cultural capital. The professor made a big deal about how important social capital and cultural capital were in reproducing class status across generations. More than once he made claims about the amount of social and cultural capital we had access to. His evidence for our privileged status was our presence in his classroom. Of course if we were well-educated, with strong social networks, and lots of cultural knowledge pertinent to middle-class life that must mean that the same was true of our parents. If our parents weren’t well-educated, with strong networks, and cultural knowledge there’s no way we could possibly be pursuing PhDs at UCLA. At the time I chalked his attitude and explicit assumptions about our privilege up to individual pomposity and ignorance. Since then, though, I have come to understand that though the assumptions are not phrased as directly as he phrased them in that classroom, the assumption is still there.

It is painful to feel that your background makes you alien. It is painful to experience this feeling of difference that you must choose constantly whether to mark or ignore. But more painful is the rampant and often offensive ignorance about the realities of day-to-day life for people with whom you strongly identify. I’m going to focus on the concept of poverty, because it is most salient to me. But I think what happens in these discussions happens elsewhere too. I don’t think the “othering” that occurs is particularly unique to the economic realm. It just feels most like a punch in a gut to me personally when it is focused on economics. There are two ways of thinking about poverty that I find particularly repugnant. The first I will call the romanticization of poverty. The second, I will call the fallacy of impossibility. I encounter examples of both all too often. And as the examples of each pile up higher and higher I become angrier and more disillusioned. I become more convinced that the tower is real, and maybe even intentional (after all, god forbid “they” try to interact with “us”).

In the case of romanticizing poverty, certain aspects of day-to-day life are drawn on to highlight how great being poor must really be. Here the simplicity of being poor is exalted. Poverty is equated with rejection of consumerism. Poverty is equated with strength and resilience. Being poor gives you something that you just can’t get if you have money. Not having money helps you realize that money doesn’t matter. Being poor makes you strong and noble and creative.

The most grievous example of offensive ignorance I have yet to experience from an academic falls into this category. I was at dinner gathering with a group of faculty members from a number of universities and disciplines. (I’m not going to go into specific details of what the dinner was, or who was there, as I would like to keep this anecdote and the players as unrecognizable as possible) A sociologist was talking to an economist. Let’s, for simplicity call the sociologist S and the economist E. S told E that she had grown up in Ohio. E asked her if she grew up in Appalachia. She said no. He asked if she was sure, since sometimes the boundaries of Appalachia were weird and some very wealthy zip codes ended up being counted as Appalachia. She insisted that she was quite sure that she did not grow up in Appalachia. E then commented that S seemed like she could be “white trash.” S was, understandably, somewhat taken aback by this comment. E assured her that he meant it as a compliment. He explained that he had once had a student who took great pride in being white trash. She was even born in a trailer. She was very vocal about her background. She was very proud of it. I interjected at this point and noted that your choices were either to proudly proclaim your background or to hide it. My comment was virtually ignored. E then went on to say how great he thought Appalachia was and how much he enjoyed going there. He insisted that the people there were just so ingenious. They took old car tires, filled them with dirt, and planted flowers in them. He extolled the virtues of this, noting how amazing it was that they could take something ugly and make it beautiful.

I could forgive E for his ignorance, his wild-eyed innocent “oh gosh being poor just makes you so strong and creative” though patterns if it weren’t for the fact that he is an economist in a powerful position in a good university. Even then, I could probably forgive the ignorance if he studied something unrelated. But, given that one of the things he studies is the economics of Appalachia and another is welfare use, I can’t help but think he should damn well know better. At the very least I would think that he could be counted upon to be smart enough to know that “white trash” is almost universally not a nice thing to call someone.

The other side of the coin from the “oh ain’t it great to conquer adversity” romantic image of poverty is the “oh it must be impossible to be anything but miserable constantly” school of thought. In this case the poor are persistantly “other.” This is very much like the school of thought that decrees that all mothers on welfare are lazy good-for-nothings that deserve their fate. The difference is that this line of thought is less negatively value laden. The thoughts aren’t framed as “the poor choose to be poor.” Rather the thoughts are framed as “being poor is horrible, miserable, all-consuming, and virtually inescapable.” Essentially the thought is that any life besides the middle-class life is really no life at all.

My most recent example of this fallacy of impossibility is framed almost literally as any life besides the middle-class life is really no life at all. I was at a talk given by Katherine Newman. The focus of the talk was on a follow-up study that she had done on the lives of the fast food workers in Harlem that are featured in No Shame in My Game. She described what happened to the original research participants over the years after the time period covered by the book. Though fast food work is seen as a dead end, she showed that a sizable number of the workers actually were able to find stepping stones to better things. She reported some of the incomes of the respondents. Many of the success stories she cited were making around $30,000 per year. During the question and answer session a member of the sociology faculty who studies income inequality raised his hand and asked “do you really have any success stories here; after all, what kind of life can you live on $30,000 per year?” I give Newman a lot of credit for responding “what kind of life can you have on $30,000 per year? A lot better life than you can have on $12,000 per year, I’ll tell you that.” She then put the numbers into a bit of perspective. For a family of four, $30,000 is about 150% of the poverty line. This, of course, assumes that there is only the one income. Many of her respondents were able to become more economically secure through marriage or cohabitation. She points out that the respondents with income in the $30,000 range had an easier time meeting their basic expenses. They could pay the rent. They could buy food.

It is useful to put numbers into perspective, to recognize that at $30,000 a year a family is far from fully economically secure. Nonetheless it angers me to have someone who studies income essentially put forward the notion that you can’t lead a happy life on $30,000 per year. It is important to remember that a $30,000 a year job does not solve all the problems of these Harlem residents. But to imply that getting from a minimum wage job to a job that pays more than twice is not success, to my mind puts too privileged a lense on success.

In college I had a classmate once say “you can’t raise a family on $30,000 per year.” I wanted to drag him to the side of town where people regularly do just that. I wanted to respond “funny, my parents did.”

Being poor does not make you strong and noble and creative. Being poor also does not doom you to unrelenting, inescapable misery. The truth is a much more nuanced something in between. And if you need a tired, disillusioned graduate student to point this out to you, then maybe you need to get your ass out of your protective tower and actually talk to someone whose name is not followed by a string of letters. Either that or you need to start calling yourself an “expert” on something else entirely. Because tires with flowers planted in them don’t make everything all better. And are you really willing to pay enough for the services you consume to pay all those workers more than $30,000 a year to support your privileged lifestyle? The fact that my parents pays all their living expenses for less money than some of you pay for your children’s private school tuition does not make them better than you. But it doesn’t make them worse either.

As a final note, to put my anger at E’s comments about Appalachia into a bit more perspective I will offer a few details of my own background. My mother’s family comes from the hills of Ohio, which is to say Appalachia. My family tree is populated by genuine hill-billies, not the quaint, struck oil and now live in LA kind you can see in reruns. Plus, growing up my grandparents (who I always saw as the very archetype of middle-class since they owned a house with a swimming pool) had at least two tractor tire planters in the back yard.

Let’s just say that, a year later, I still can’t find the words for how I felt sitting in that conversation. I remember trying to find the words to answer the things that he was saying. I remember spending the rest of the night wondering if I should pull him aside and explain to him that nowhere is “white trash” a compliment. And I remember crying the entire drive home because it hit me during the course of that night–while eating fancy catered food in a house nicer than anything my high school self could ever have imagined affording, in a neighborhood where houses cost more than my father will have made in his entire work history–that I will likely spend the rest of my life making the calculations I made during that conversation. Can I afford to challenge this? How do I explain the degree to which I am offended by this without seeming rude, reactionary, or otherwise unprofessional? Ultimately, someone tactfully changed the subject before I could offer a rejoinder. Notably everyone else in the conversation seemed uncomfortable. But no one challenged E on his statements. In that night it became clear to me that the off hand problematic comments I heard and the offensive assumptions about the poor that are dropped into talks and sometimes even into research papers weren’t just idiosyncratic pieces of personal ignorance. In that night it dawned on me, much the way that the pain from a punch in the gut dawns on you, that what I was looking at was a trend.

Last week I logged onto the website of my local credit union to check and see if my rent check had cleared yet. Upon arriving at their website I was greeted by a picture of a large TV with a football player jumping out of it to catch a football and text proclaiming “Buying a HDTV? Finance it with a low-rate [Credit Union] loan.” Now of course as a graduate student I’m probably not in the best position to be criticizing other people’s financial decisions. I’ve taken out student loans that paid for all sorts of stupid things (though mostly those things were food, rent, and car insurance). And I regularly end up carrying credit card debt for moderate periods of time (i.e. less than a year but more than a month). Again this is mostly for semi-necessary bills (arguably my cell phone isn’t necessary nor is a large chunk of my food expenditure) but there are certainly splurges that appear there. Nonetheless, despite not exactly being little Ms. Frugal myself, I am utterly and completely horrified by the mere idea of taking out a loan to buy a TV.

In the interest of full disclosure I should probably mention that I find this particularly horrific precisely because I don’t watch TV, and thus don’t understand the concept of high definition TV. But really, even if I loved TV, I think I’d be hard pressed to understand the concept of taking out a loan to buy one. Granted, loans in general are not my default mindset. I grew up in an essentially debt-free home. My parents rent and as far as I know they always paid for cars outright. My mother is a big believer in paying off credit cards every month. Given that, the fact that I have any debt at all is stressful for me (even though my student loan debt is minimal compared to how long I’ve been in school). But I understand the concept of debt. Mortgages seem an inevitable part of middle-class life. And I can see myself someday giving in to the idea of a car payment (if I’m really lucky my current car–which was bought new as a gift from a relative when I started graduate school–will last me long enough that I don’t have to contemplate the idea of student loan debt and car payments at the same time). But what mindset ends you up taking out a loan for a TV?

I’ve seen lots of figures (which I am currently too lazy to dig up) about Americans and their debt load. I think I’ve always sort of naively assumed that this was primarily credit card debt that built up over time and series of small purchases. Of course that sort of debt isn’t better in any sense and is almost certainly worse in the sense that it probably entails much higher interest rates. But, to me at least, it’s more understandable than debt incurred in one fell swoop for purely luxury items. I can understand how small purchases that “I’ll pay off next month, really” could aggregate and spiral into massive credit card debt. I can understand how living on credit cards for a couple of months while unemployed could have the same effect. The thought process that leads to “I need an HDTV and I think I’ll take out a line of credit from the credit union for it” is a bit beyond me. Presumably it’s somehow SuperBowl related. But that makes it even further beyond me (during my first year of college I fell in with a group of sports-lovers; they forbade me from joining them to watch the SuperBowl since I made it clear that really I only wanted to come watch the commercials).

I suppose what really perplexed me was the fact that this was on my credit union’s website. I tend to think of credit unions as more focused on their customer base and less on profit than a bank. Probably because I grew up in a small town with a very friendly, very grass roots feeling credit union where the tellers would actually recognize my mother and I when we would come in. So the thought of a credit union advertising loans for TVs just feels disappointing to me. It feels very much like “haha we’re going to make a profit off your idiocy” rather than “we are looking out for you and your money.” One could argue of course that this is looking out for people’s money if you assume that they’re going to buy the HDTV no matter what and their choice set is a) buy on store credit b) buy on credit card c) steal money to buy it or d) buy with credit union loan. Clearly if that is the situation, then the credit union is doing people a service by leading them to choice d. However, if the choice process is a) don’t by an expensive TV because I can’t afford it or b) go into debt for a TV then I think the credit union is doing their members a disservice in leading them toward b.

Meanwhile I wish I owned a home so that I could cash in the equity to pay for an extravagant vacation or a boat or something. At this point the Jones are going to get to their bankruptcy hearing way before I do.

I wish I had something insightful to say about Schwarzenegger’s decision to deny clemency to Stanley Tookie Williams. For me it comes down fundamentally to the fact that I am firmly against the death penalty. Given that, I need not delve any deeper into the questions of guilt vs. innocence or whether Williams has legitimately changed. But this case makes me sad at a deep level because it is not just a question of the morality of state sanctioned killing. For me there is something much deeper to this than just the case of a man convicted of murder who will be put to death by a criminal system structured around revenge rather than reformation.

Surrounding all of this are the realities of race and class hierarchies in this country. Williams is a founder of the Crips. Given that fact, it is perhaps easy to understand the bloodlust that this case seems to inspire for some. But it ignores the question of how gangs form and survive in the first place. It’s not my area of expertise so I can’t lay out all the forces involved. But I will suggest that perhaps when society denies you access to resources and infastructure it is logical to form social structures that give you access to other resources. Too often it seems to me that the way violence and crime gets talked falls back to the assumption of actual equality, both under law and in a the reality of day-to-day living. It always surprises me when people assume that all that is necessary to get out of poverty is the desire to get out of poverty. As if somehow wanting an education will change the quality of the school system you are in (on this one I can assure you from my own experience that it does not). As if somehow wanting a job will change the labor market you are in. It’s a pervasive myth. And a dangerous one.

Don’t get me wrong. I am not arguing that we should shrug our shoulders at the activities of gangs. But I think discussions of these things need to face the realities of what the choices for young men of color in poor urban areas are. These boys are not making the choice between gang life and a job on wall street. But who am I kidding? It is precisely the ability to stick your head in the sand that race and class privilege buys.

Tonight I am sad, and angry. I am also mildly concerned that other people’s sadness and anger may be expressed as violence (lots of my friends seem a bit concerned about violence in my neighborhood and surrounding areas but my fear is more generic than personal; perhaps this is naive) . I’m not normally the type to pray in recognizable ways. But tonight I will light a candle and hope.

So there’s been some discussion in various places of an article in the NY Times about a coffee shop in Chicago that put up a sign saying “children of all ages have to behave and use their indoor voices when coming to A Taste of Heaven.” This dovetails with something else that I’ve been thinking about lately.

Not long ago I was flipping through Bitch Ph.D.’s better rants and came across this post about children. Dr. B makes the argument that children are members of society, not public goods. I have to admit that I’m guilty of the “children are public goods” argument. Actually it’s my default argument when it comes to discussing public policy and children, particulary when my audience happens to be of the child-free crowd or libertarians arguing for the total privatization of education. This is not to say that I think children are only public goods. As Dr. B makes pretty clear, that would be distinctly anti-social of me. But people who hate children, or hate providing support for other people’s children, aren’t likely to be swayed by moral societal arguments. (Note, by the way, that I don’t mean to imply that all of the child-free folks hate children, but people who hate children are an important subset to whom policy arguments need to be addressed). I firmly believe that even if you hate children and think they are little embodiments of satan who have no place in society, that you are still obligated to provide support to them and their parents in the form of family-friendly public policy. Why? Sure, I suppose one could argue that there’s the moral obligation to deal with fellow humans in ethical ways. But more importantly, though utterly cliched, children are the future. Today’s children are tomorrow’s workforce and tomorrow’s criminals. There are lots of really good reasons to invest in children. And most of those reasons can be cast in terms of public goods, even if perhaps they shouldn’t be.

That aside, though, back to the question of children in public spaces. As someone who doesn’t have children, and who, at the present time, has no intention of having children, I find myself sometimes having a hard time figuring out what the appropriate societal and policy lines between children’s rights and adults’ rights are. Public space is a particularly vexing issue for me. I know that I should be supportive of children in public spaces. Socialization is good for children and, by my own public goods arguments, things that are good for children are ultimately good for society and me. And of course, besides that, children are people and should be treated as such.

This means that, for instance, I should be perfectly fine with well-behaved children in restaurants. Nonetheless, last spring I found myself at a table in a restaurant next to a table with two relatively well-behaved boys who were about eight to ten years old. They weren’t particularly loud, but they were loud enough for their conversation to easily carry to our table and somehow their voices were just grating enough that I wasn’t really able to cope and I ended up making a very snarky comment about their presence to my dinner companion. I said it in what was meant to be a whisper but was apparently loud enough for him to think the parents could have potentially heard. In my defense I was tired, overwhelmed, and dealing with a death in the family. Still, I was mortified by my hostility, and even more disturbed to find myself rather hostile to children present in other public spaces. I have become one of those adults who winces when I walk to my gate at the airport and note the presence of members of the pre-school set.

The truth is that though I recognize the right of children to be present in society, all too often I wish they weren’t. I have great respect for parents who have well-behaved children. I also have a great deal of sympathy for parents who want to spend time out in the world and can’t afford babysitters. But I also really like the idea of being able to go out for dinner without having to worry about whether there’ll be a temper tantrum two tables over (not that temper tantrums are absent among adults, but they’re less common).

In general I’m very supportive of policies that make life better for parents and children. I’m all for family leave. I’m all for employer (or public) subsidized child care. And I’m theoretically all for the right of children to participate in public places. But I do think that parents have a responsibility to make sure that their children behave in ways that are acceptable to the spaces their children are in. If we’re going to argue that children have a right to be in public space because they are people and we have to deal with people in public spaces then shouldn’t we also be willing to accept arguments that children should have to abide by similar rules to those followed by other people in the space? There’s the example of children running and throwing themselves at the display cases in the coffee shop. Wouldn’t an adult doing similar be asked to leave? What about the kid lying in the way of the coffee line? Wouldn’t we be perfectly justified in asking an adult blocking a line to at least move over? I honestly think we do a disservice to children by assuming that they are incapable of behaving in reasonable ways. Sure, everyone has bad days, kids included. But part of growing up is learning how to behave in ways that are consistent with the norms of the setting. Is someone really going to argue that that’s a bad thing?

I’m not sure what the balance is, really. On the one hand as an adult without children I think that I really ought to be able to go places and spend my money on food and coffee without having to deal with screaming. Let’s note that I’d be just as irate if the screaming came from adults (there is, after all, a reason I avoid sports bars). I like quiet. But I also firmly believe that we as a society need to integrate children better and be more supportive to parents. I suppose it makes me a hypocrite to wish that we could integrate children better somewhere else, doesn’t it?