02 May 2012

My Latest Newspaper Column: Tornadoes and Zombies, Oh My!


Practical skills still relevant

St. Cloud (MN) Times
5/2/2012

Each spring, as tornado season approaches, we are reminded to prepare for possible power outages and to have supplies on hand in case disaster strikes. With care and foresight most of us will be prepared to ride out a major storm and even to survive without power, food or water for a few days after should the unthinkable happen. But how prepared are we for a longer or more widespread disaster?

Many writers are exploring these questions in fiction, as in Max Brooks’ best-selling novel “World War Z: An Oral History of the Zombie War,” soon to be a major film starring Brad Pitt. The zombie-fighting genre is popular precisely because it asks its fans: Are you prepared not only to deal with the loss of daily conveniences, but the core necessities that make life possible?

Preparing for a fictional zombie apocalypse might seem like a ridiculous thing to consider, but consider the challenges: Survivors would need access to food, fuel, shelter, a group of friends large enough to provide for themselves, and a means of defense.

The problem is that few of us are prepared for any real long-term emergency, like a Hurricane Katrina or a major influenza pandemic, that could cut us off from outside aid for days or weeks on end. Could you manage a day without a cell phone? A week without electricity? Fifteen days without refilling your medication? A month without gasoline? A half year without shopping or adding anything you didn’t make yourself to your household?

In practice few of us can grow our own food, repair our own cars, make our own clothes, doctor our own wounds, or even keep warm without being tied to a global chain of mines, mills, farms, and factories. We are a nation of consumers, not producers. We can’t make, build, or do much of anything, but exist mostly to sell goods and services to one another while depending on a range of imported technologies we don’t understand but can’t live without. Close the stores, turn off the power, and use up the gasoline and we’d be on our way to total collapse even without the added threat of the living dead.

Zombie stories are popular not simply for their violence or horrific imagery, but because they offer an imaginary setting for conflict in which competent people survive. Indeed, in zombie fiction it is never the rich, rarely the beautiful, and often not even the strong who live to see the next day. Being prepared – which means being capable of self sufficiency – is the key to survival.

A century ago Americans would have enjoyed better odds against zombies (or a real natural disaster) than most of us today. People canned their own food, walked or rode horses for transportation, learned practical skills in school and on the farm, and they would have been just fine for a week or four if the power cut out or the trains stopped running. Most importantly, they knew their neighbors, so coordinating a group of survivors wouldn’t require an email chain to organize or introductions between people who had lived next door for years but never met in person.

Modern conveniences offer us a lot. We have more leisure time, a wider range of luxuries to enjoy, and the opportunity to specialize in whatever pursuits we like. But they’ve also isolated us, made us more dependent on things we can’t control, and left us soft. As any good zombie movie will tell you, being prepared means more than having some snacks in the basement or a flashlight by the bed. It means knowing how to take care of yourself, and your neighbors, until things get better. Your iPod won’t be much help, but grandma’s canned cherries might save your life.

Hopefully most of us are ready for storm season. Perhaps we can spend some of it relearning a few of the practical skills our grandparents took for granted. Just in case.

04 April 2012

My latest newspaper column: birth control in historical perspective

April 4, 2012

Times Writers Group: Birth control access is vital

Big changes in society, biology support its use

The idea that birth control would become a key issue in the GOP primary race would have seemed preposterous last summer, but Rick Santorum’s unexpected rise to become the last obstacle in Mitt Romney’s preordained path to the nomination changed everything this winter.

Now, thanks largely to the arch-conservative from Pennsylvania, a debate that was effectively ended by the Supreme Court a half-century ago has been reopened, and again Americans are arguing about whether women should have access to birth control.

Birth control was a controversial topic in the 19th century, and several states had banned the sale of birth control devices and medications by 1900. These laws were collectively struck down with the Supreme Court’s 1965 decision in Griswold v. Connecticut, which found an 1879 state law prohibiting the use of birth control and banning doctors from discussing the issue with their patients to be unconstitutional. Writing for the 7-2 majority, Justice William O. Douglas identified a “right to privacy” in the Constitution that invalidated Connecticut’s attempt to legislate morality.

Santorum disagrees, however, claiming the court erred and claiming “the state has the right to pass whatever statues” it wishes.

Legal arguments aside, the truth is that Santorum’s campaign against birth control is as quixotic as his run against Romney. What hasn’t been said often enough is that arguments against birth control are not only political losers, but that scientific and sociological observations alone should convince rational observers that America will never go back to its pre-Griswold stance.

Modern necessity
Our bodies and our society have changed enough since the 19th century that it simply wouldn’t work.

Consider Santorum’s favorite alternative to birth control for unmarried people: abstinence.
Avoiding sexual intercourse before marriage may well have been a rational idea in the late 19th century, when social morés strictly limited unchaperoned contact during courtship.
The age of consent then was 10 to 12 years in most states, and marriages in the early teens were not uncommon.

The average age of menarche – onset of puberty in girls – was slightly older than 14 in 1900. The odds were good then that the gap between sexual maturity and marriage was quite small, perhaps three to five years on average and often less.

In a culture that outwardly condemned premarital sex and lacked widespread access to birth control, abstinence may have been viable for some percentage of teens, especially if they were only expected to rely on it for a short time between puberty and marriage.

Fast forward to 2012. Today, the age of consent ranges from 16 to 18 in all states. The median age of first marriage has climbed to 28 for men and 26 for women. And most significantly, biological changes ascribed to a range of factors have driven the age of menarche down to 12, with many girls entering puberty as young as 10.

Do the math. Now the average span from sexual maturity to marriage is 14 years, often longer.

Abstinence that sometimes worked for about three years in 1900 is simply unrealistic when applied to the 14 year gap young people face today in a dramatically more sexualized culture.

Changing norms
Even if one ignores the evidence, abstinence is not only unrealistic, it simply doesn’t work because most people fail to abstain.

The investment of more than $1 billion in federal funds to support abstinence-based sex education the past decade has not impacted our changing bodies and social norms at all. A 2007 study published in Public Health Reports found that the vast majority — 95 percent — of Americans have sex before marriage, 75 percent of them before 20.

Those are the facts and regardless of what Santorum thinks, we need to maintain access to birth control and comprehensive sex education for everyone if we’re even remotely serious about reducing the numbers of unintended or unplanned pregnancies among American youth.

26 March 2012

Join the Party!

Wondering if the GOP is the right political home for you?  Betty Bowers will help you decide with this delightful and engaging video. Watch, and you'll know if it's time to Join the Party!

15 March 2012

Why abstinence won't work-- and why telling kids it will is wrong

A century ago adolescents reached puberty (sexual maturity) around age 15 or 16. They married on average at age 17, so a net gap of 1-3 years during which abstinence was socially expected, if not actually practiced.

Today the average girl is reaching menarche at 10-11 years of age in the US. (Lots of data are available on that.) Meanwhile, the average age of first marriage has risen to 26 for women and 28 for men. The net gap is now between 15-18 years.

This is basic biology: social constraints *may have* once prevented unmarried youth from engaging in intercourse (though Kinsey found 50% of women and 68% of men did it anyway). When the expected period of abstinence was 1-3 years it might have worked.

Today it's five times that, and basically nobody is "waiting for marriage." To pretend otherwise is not only to enbrace ignorance, it's dangerous. Children and young adults need to be equipped to live in reality, not some perverse fantasy-land vision of a 1950s that never existed.

Let'e get focused-- with Focus!

There is no more amazing music than this 1973 track from the Dutch band Focus. Seriously.