Are Men Becoming Marginalized?

I read a lot of different things and my mind collects all kinds of seemingly unrelated pieces of information. Every so often a collection of these snippets will seem to line up and I have an Aha! moment. I had one of those the other day and I suddenly realized that this country has crossed a tipping point. A down hill slope has been presented which I think will lead to men becoming marginalized in our society. 

For most of recorded history men have held an advantage which has for the most part placed them in a position of being in charge, both in society and in the home. In the distant past most well paying jobs or traditional work required physical strength, which gave men (in general) an advantage. World War 2 started to break this barrier when “Rosie the riveter” and thousands of women went to work in factories and proved they could do jobs previously assumed to be “Men Only”. Women also discovered that they could maintain a home without a man around. Furthermore, with a large percentage of the men away to war, women began to discover that they could go by themselves or in a group of women and have fun, without needing a man along to “protect” them.

When the war ended and the men came home, most of these advances got reversed and things went back to “normal”. The men entrenched themselves as the leaders of society and the breadwinners. While, as previously, a few women broke barriers, they were the exception. The women’s movement in the 60s and 70s broke down a lot of those barriers and eventually women were accepted into the workforce on a sort of equal footing (except that it took until recently for pay to catch up). Still men held, for the most part, on to control of the best paying and executive jobs. They also used the “traditional” role as the main breadwinner to keep an increasingly tenuous control over society and the family.

As we moved into the 80s and 90s the”traditional” model of the man as the breadwinner and the woman as a stay at home mom eroded as most families economic situation required that 2 incomes were needed to maintain the “American Dream” and keep up with the Joneses. This has destroyed the notion that the wife is the nurturer and the husband the provider. Nurturing has to a large extent been outsourced to day care and the schools.

Unfortunately, many of the relatively high paying and traditionally male orientated jobs were in manufacturing. Those jobs were  disappearing due to off-shoring and automation. But still we men went along relying on traditional roles to maintain our position. The country was changing from heavy manufacturing to technology, but still men held the upper hand since women were severely under represented in engineering, computer programming, and to a lesser extent in science.

Then came the recession of 2007-8. Jobs disappeared in all sectors, but most hard hit were those heavy manufacturing jobs that had been the traditional stronghold of men. Factories shut down all over, but especially hard hit were the north central “Rust Belt” states where the factory jobs for the most part required high physicality and were thus predominately held by males. The jobs that had the least losses were things like medical, education, and food service, where women traditionally were in the majority.

As the economy recovered, many companies, instead of reopening shuttered factories, automated the ones that were still open or built new automated ones in locations favorable to their industries and the old jobs disappeared. Automated factories didn’t require physical strength so much as the old ones, so many of the new jobs were now open to women. Seemingly overnight, the role of main breadwinner slid towards the woman.

OK, all this was happening, but how does this marginalize men? Some of the seemingly disconnected facts that I put together to reach this conclusion are:

Most of the jobs that the country has recovered since the recession are of the type that are equally open to women. (The unemployment rate of women is now considerably lower than for men). 

The percentage of adults that are married has dropped below 50%. This could be attributed to either that the social need to be married has decreased and unmarried couples are living together, or women don’t feel the need to have a man hanging around. I think the answer is both, but a further statistic that a large percentage of children are living in single parent homes (mostly female headed) seems to support that the latter is the dominant trend.

Most of the traditional things that men used to be very useful for around the home have gone away. Automobiles are so much more reliable these days as well as being almost impossible for an amateur to work on that the traditional role of the home mechanic has all but disappeared. A majority of single women live in apartments so home maintenance (lawn mowing etc) isn’t as much of a factor (not that women can’t do those things, but these have traditionally been male roles).

Women have become much more open and accepting about getting sexual satisfaction by themselves. Many female orientated sex toy stores have opened up, and of course the internet has enabled the purchase of various toys without braving the leering stares present in most XXX stores. Men, we have only ourselves to blame for that. Men traditionally have worried about their own satisfaction and less about hers. Only a minority of us men have bothered to work at learning what excites our partner, much less to go through the foreplay to insure mutual satisfaction.

It still takes a man to make babies at least. That final bastion of need for males has been severely eroded by artificial insemination, and advances in fertility medicine. This was brought home to me by a news story about a sperm donor who was reported to have fathered over 100 children. So if all the women who want babies can get impregnated by less than 1% of us men, and do it without traditional sex, we are in serious trouble. Advances in cloning will remove even that requirement.

So we have lost our economic hold, women have proven that they can be successful heads of families, they can produce children with only minor or perhaps no involvement by men, and they can get sexual satisfaction without us. What are we to do to at least stay relevant in the upcoming future society? Will we be reduced to being soldiers, police, firemen, heavy laborers, sperm donors, or Chippendale dancers, and have a diminishing role in the family? 

It isn’t going to happen rapidly, there still is a lot of social inertia, but I think we men better look very hard at how we interact with society in general and especially the opposite sex. 

Am I worried? Not at all, I welcome the demise of the male chauvinist pig. I have the knowledge to be more interesting in bed than a Hitachi, as well as having developed some skills in it’s use, as well as other toys of pleasure. I’m also more interesting to be around. I can actually discuss feelings and emotions. Best of all, I am willing to do those household tasks such as cooking and cleaning that are still relevant to modern society. Of course at 71 I’m not likely to be around, or care, when these social changes really get to a critical point. 

I’m merely warning the next generation of men that they had better get their act together and make themselves more than a handyman and sperm source, or you may find out that women have found a way to replace you and not have to put up with your unpleasant habits, demands, Saturday/ Monday night Football, and one sided sex.

The Government Shutdown

We are now in the fourth day of the government shutdown, with no sign that any side is willing to compromise. According to the news reports I have heard the main sticking point seems to be that a minority faction wants to defund the Affordable Care Act, in spite of the fact that it’s law, and was voted on by Congress after much heated debate. The argument seems to be that the country can’t afford it. Well, if the figures I hear are close to accurate, we are wasting more money with the shutdown than the Health Care Act will cost. 

The correct way to change the Health Care Act is to propose a bill doing that, and try to get it passed. Not shut down the government, potentially throw the country back into depression, and with the debt ceiling limit (that Congress kicked down the road 2 years ago instead of solving) looming in a couple of weeks, causing a major default on treasury bonds. 

But, apparently in their minds, this all pales in importance with who can win the pissing contest between the anti and pro Universal Health Care factions. No one seems to realize that if even some of the doom and gloom predictions about government defaults come to pass, health care will become the least of our worries. How about worrying about where to get food, gas costing $10 a gallon, and no electricity or utilities.

I suppose we only have ourselves to blame, after all we elected those self serving people to congress after we saw what they did about the debt ceiling 2 years ago. I’d call them idiots, but even idiots know enough not to cut off their nose to spite their face.

I’ve already blogged about health care so I won’t say much except that we need to get the greedy people and companies out of trying to milk the system and get costs in line. If we do that Universal Health Care won’t cost us any more than we pay now.

What do we need to do to get congress in line? Well a million man/woman march on the capitol with torches and pitchforks might do some good. While I don’t approve of lynchings, the threat of a few might get their attention. Otherwise, we need to remember this debacle next year when elections come around and throw the bastards out. I also expect a reduction in my Federal taxes for all the days they have been off work.

To prevent this sort of thing from happening in the future there are a few reforms that need to be made:

1. No rider can be attached to any bill that does not have a direct connection to the main intent of the bill. This would prevent the sneaking in of pork-barrel projects and special interest legislation as riders on other legislation.

1. Election reform needs to make it possible to make a serious run for national office without needing to raise hundreds of millions of dollars in order to have a chance to win. This would prevent the purchase of Congressmen by special interests.

1. As rapidly as possible, change the ability of the government to borrow money so that it has to run a balanced budget like many states do. This will end the periodic fight over the debt ceiling as well as being a good fiscal policy.

1. Any bill that spends money, has to include a source for funding that expense. This will add a lot of transparency in how we pay for those government services.

1. Like most corporate and household budgets, the Federal budget needs to be a continuing thing, with periodic reviews, but funding for ongoing agencies doesn’t automatically go away at the end of the year. Specific projects should be funded for a specified period (possibly multi-year) and automatically terminated.

Of course in order to get these changes in place, reason will have to prevail and the greedy will have to back down. If that can happen, world peace is possible too. 

I do have a lot of faith in the American people’s ability to overcome insurmountable obstacles. Maybe we will realize that we really can get along quite well without the government, Wouldn’t it be ironic if Congress just bickered themselves out of a job.

Education

We are about to start another school year and we will begin to hear complaints about excessive classroom sizes, crumbling buildings, ill equipped classrooms, poor graduation rates, poor performances against other countries, and of course pleas for more money to solve all those problems. 

The truth is that this money will be spent to mostly line the pockets of political contributors, pay excessive salaries to administrators, lots of studies to see why our school system is failing, and a host of other non-educational related things. Very little of it will find it’s way into the classroom and the salaries of those dedicated teachers on the front lines. Let’s face it, the education system in this country (and most of the world) is broken, and throwing money at it will only compound the problem.

The problem is twofold. First it has become a very profitable way to feed off the public trough. While it might be very difficult to pass a bond issue to improve an intersection or build a government office building, school bond issues usually pass quite easily. Additionally, legislators are always loth to block school related legislation so even ill conceived funding bills pass easily.

Most school systems have more administrative staff than teachers, and a large proportion of those get paid far more than the teachers who actually do the heavy lifting. Additionally since these administrators have little actual work to do they spend their time  dreaming up ways to impede and restrict the teachers from doing their job effectively. A prime example of this is the “standardized test”. Which is used to “evaluate teacher’s performance”. While I agree that some method of evaluating teachers effectiveness is useful, the way that those tests are set up forces teachers to teach students how to pass those tests, rather than useful real skills. In short we have far too many chiefs and not enough indians. 

The second part of the problem is that the curriculum and the teaching methods are the same that they have been for the past several hundred years. The world has changed mightily in the past century and a huge amount in the past 20 years. If we conclude that the purpose of school is to prepare children to be employable, and good members of society, we have to realize that both of those things are completely different than they were even 20 years ago. For example, there is little need for cursive writing and long division skills. Most people write on keyboards and have calculators to do math. While I don’t advocate dropping writing and math from schools, they need to be deemphasized in favor of more useful skills such as keyboarding, computer operation, and skills related to analysis of problems so as to be able to use the tools we have available rather than being to calculate complex math in our head or on paper.

Another thing that has seems to have gotten lost, is the ability to write coherently. Since that is something that is difficult to check on a multiple choice standardized test and is time consuming for overworked teachers to grade, It has received a bit of a deemphasis in today’s classroom. The written word has become even more important in today’s world, where most communication is via text (no longer handwritten but text nevertheless). Clear, concise, communication is more important than ever. Being able to write and of course read and understand the written word is more important than ever. Yet we have a crisis where 3rd graders can’t read or write reasonably well, and the administrators want to advance them anyhow because it’d look bad on their record if they had too many failures to advance. Which is worse, holding a child back or making them take a summer remedial reading class, or setting them up for failure down the road? 

While “No Child Left Behind” sounded good, the result has too many times been “slow everyone to the lowest common denominator”. Which pushes the bright students into boredom and teaches the average students that they don’t have to work hard to meet expectations. In short it has dragged the whole system and a couple of generations of our children down. It’s high time to adopt an “Everyone to the Best of Their Abilities” mantra. With computerized courses being able to allow students to go at their own pace in learning, and the ability of each student to have his own iPad type device, every student should be able to progress at their own pace. Teachers, freed from route teaching, can spend their time on individual instruction and encouragement. Progress can be easily measured without standardized tests, and will free the students and teachers from the stress and wasted classroom time preparing and taking these largely meaningless tests. Most importantly, individual progress can be assessed, and remedies applied frequently, rather than at testing time, when it’s likely too late.

A serious flaw in the system is that it is run by academicians. They got their higher education from people who became teachers immediately after graduation after getting their education from people who became teachers immediately after graduation and so on. Seldom has there been someone in the chain with real world experience in industry or business. Given the rapid pace of change in the world we need teachers that teach our children the skills that are useful to make them productive in the real world. Let’s involve outsiders in textbook writing, and curriculum planning, and invite in guest teachers from time to time. Lots more hands on learning would be a good idea too.

It’ll take some creative work to finance the new equipment and a lot of effort to alter the curriculum. But, in the long run, we’ll have better educated kids more able to get good jobs and a lot fewer dropouts. Also, it'll give those underutilized administrators something productive to do.  I think, ultimately, it won’t cost any more than the current bloated, ineffective system if we can keep the money-grubbers out of it. 

Florida v. George Zimmerman

The Jury has reached a verdict in the case of George Zimmerman and Trayvon Martin. A lot will be heard of about how unfair the verdict was, and that we are allowing racism to run rampant in this country. Since I didn’t hear all the testimony, and the information that I have has been colored by the news media, I have to defer to the jury’s opinion. I trust that they will be able to live with their decision. Whether that decision was absolutely correct, or was influenced by all the publicity, or botched by incompetence of the prosecution is something that I’m sure will be endlessly debated in the media and on line for months. But the verdict is in and we must accept it.

My take on what happened is that two people saw something that, in each of their views of the world, alarmed them, and they reacted to an imagined threat. Fear overruled common sense, and the outcome was unfortunate in the extreme. My heart goes out to the Martin family for their great loss. 

The only silver lining in this is that it makes us reexamine our own reactions to someone who is different than us. Why, in a mixed race neighborhood, (or anywhere) would a black teenager walking home be viewed as anything out of the ordinary? I can see that, in spite of the vast strides we have made since the 60s, our perceptions of other people are still colored by appearance. Some of that is fed to us by the media. How many more times have you heard “the suspect is a black/hispanic/Muslim etc.” than “the suspect was a white/Protestant”. 

After the Oklahoma City bombing I never once heard any mention of Timothy McVey’s religion. There were certainly no threatened or actual burnings of Methodist churches, like there were of mosques after 9-11. After all it is more dramatic if the villain is a ......... (Insert race/gender/age/religion/sexual preference here) than a clean cut well dressed person of our race/gender/age/religion /sexual preference. So we are trained to equate different race/gender/age/religion /sexual preferences with villainy, and therefore all ......... are suspect. It is that perception that we have to overcome. 

It has been 50 years since we struck down  “separate but equal” and got rid of “No Colored Allowed”, or “Back of the bus”. It’s high time we stopped judging people by appearance and started using the same value system for everyone, regardless of race/gender/age/religion /sexual preference.

We need to examine our own feelings. Do we somehow fear the unknown or different? If we were walking along a dark street and came up on another person or someone was walking behind us, would our perception of what we see, or imagine, color our emotional response to the situation? Of course it would. It’s only human nature. The important thing is to temper our reactions. If the threat is only in our perception, then leave it there, perhaps some caution is in order, but don’t let our imagination place us in a situation where we overreact and harm ourselves or someone else.

I’m reminded of the song in Rodgers and Hammerstein’s South Pacific “You’ve Got to be Carefully Taught”.

You've got to be taught To hate and fear You've got to be taught From year to Year It's got to be drummed  in your dear little ear You've got to be carefully taught You've got to be taught To be Afraid Of people whose eyes  are oddly made And people whose skin Is a different shade You've got to be carefully taught You've got to be taught Before it's too late Before you are 6 or 7 or 8  To hate all the people  your relatives hate You've got to be carefully taught

Well, I propose that we can be untaught hate and fear, and to embrace all people as equals and judge everyone as an individual. 

Let us make this Trayvon’s legacy, that we overcame our prejudices and began accepting everyone as valuable human beings, regardless of race/gender/age/religion/sexual preference, and embrace those differences, for adding spice to our lives, instead of being a threat.

Immigration Reform ???

I see in recent news that the government has decided to implement “immigration reform” by building a bigger fence and hiring more border guards to protect us from what? A bunch of hard working people who are willing to do those jobs that most americans sneer at? 

We only have to look at East Germany during the cold war to see how effective fences are at preventing people from seeking a better life. They used 20 foot concrete walls,  mine fields and the guards shot fence jumpers on sight. Hopefully we aren’t quite to that point, but even at that, it was a miserable failure at its intended purpose and blighted the economy of East Germany for years. 

They say its purpose is protection from terrorists and drug cartels, and is a matter of national security. Well, The drug cartels will either tunnel under, fly over or bribe their way through. The terrorists will fly in on commercial flights or pay the drug cartels to use their infrastructure to get in. 

Keeping weapons out? Last I heard, we were the third largest exporter of weapons to terrorists. They have no need to bring them in, just buy them here. OK, maybe a suitcase Nuke might need to be imported. You can bet anyone with one of those has plenty of resources to get it past a fence and a few border guards, or bypass the southern border entirely and bring it in along a coast or via Canada.

So we are back to the people who simply want a better job and a better life. I’m sure that most of them would be much happier staying home, if only those better jobs existed there. 

You can argue that, useless as it is, at least it creates jobs. Yes, short term ones building the fence. Most of those will (I bet) go to immigrant laborers, because, being short term heavy construction in some inhospitable parts of the country, they will be shunned by most Americans. A lot of relatively high paying jobs right across the border just increases the incentive for the immigrants to come across the border to seek work. 

The long term jobs will be the border guards, and the support infrastructure to support them. Thats all well and good, but there is no potential for those expenditures to expand the economy. They are simply a drain on our already stressed federal budget.

Now if we took those billions of dollars budgeted for the fence and guards and put half of it into improving useful infrastructure in the US (i.e. roads and bridges, WiFi nationwide, solar and wind power etc.) we’d create just as many long term jobs, and the result of those expenditures would contribute to the economic well being of the country for years to come, instead of a useless folly of a fence which will be riddled with holes in a few years and whose maintenance will further drain our resources. 

If we then take the other half and invest it in improving the economy of those countries where those illegal immigrants come from we’ll remove the motivation for them to cross the border. Problem solved, and we don’t end up looking stupid.