When I was younger, I wanted to be someone’s miracle. I wouldn’t have phrased it like that, because there isn’t a nine year old alive that eloquent, but that is what I wanted. I never doubted that I was going to grow up to be a strong, successful, wonderful woman. But I was also thoroughly convinced that one day, there would be a man -- one I was a little bit mean to-- who would be just dazzled by all of my strength, success, and wonderfulness. And then I would be his miracle. And he would love me because I was just so miraculous.
This was an idea that, of course, I got from television.
In the opening lines of John Green’s Paper Towns, the narrator, a lovely Floridian boy named Quentin, expresses the belief that everyone gets a miracle, because, when you consider all of the unlikely, miraculous events in the world, one of them is likely to happen to you. And Quentin knows what his miracle is already; it isn’t marrying the Queen of England or being eaten by a whale. It is that, “out of all the houses in all the subdivisions in all of Florida, I ended up living next door to Margo Roth Spiegelman.”
And there it was. If not the exact story I wanted (because what fifteen year old wants to live in a subdivision?) the exact feeling I wanted, captured in words. On the first page this girl, whomever she was, was already someone’s miracle. That the someone wasn’t her, and that he was a boy, and that he didn’t seem to even know her that well, didn’t make a difference to me. She was something special. On the first page, I thought I would love Margo because she’s Quentin’s miracle. It turns out, I love her because she saves herself (and me, and Quentin) from the tragic fate of being someone’s miracle.
Paper Towns, it must be said, is frankly a delightful read. After declaring Margo a miracle, Quentin goes on to crush on her throughout elementary, middle, and high school. He tells the reader breathlessly of Margo’s exploits through their teen years -- she organizes gigantic TP campaigns and rejects the bass player of a famous band. She’s….mysterious, delightful, quirky. He thinks she’s the type of girl whose whole life is one long music video.
As senior year draws to a close, one night Margo shows up at Quentin’s bedroom window. They have a glorious, wonderful night of completely ridiculous hijinks. It’s just so much fun to read -- the whole sequence captures perfectly what I imagined it would be like to live in a Boys Like Girls music video. Then Margo disappears. She seems to leave a series of clues for Quentin so that he can find her and rescue her. He enlists friends, both his and hers, to help with the seemingly wacky scavenger hunt. Then the scavenger hunt becomes notably less wacky.
As the Margo-less days wind on and the other characters search for her, the story becomes less and less like a movie. It doesn’t move neatly into the second and thirds acts. Instead, there are dead ends. The periphery characters start to loudly insist that they have their own lives to live and have concerns outside of Quentin and Margo. They actually act on those concerns. The story reaches a point where the action rises enough that it seems like a climax at the big dance and a fade-out into an iconic song is coming. But when the exciting moment arrives, instead Quentin is reading Song of Myself alone in an abandoned building. As Paper Towns progresses, the movie script falls apart. The idea of Margo as a perfect movie character goes right with it.
Because it turns out that being Quentin’s miracle isn’t actually helping teenage Margo become an adult person. And it isn’t helping teenage Quentin much either. The romantic, well-lit gaze he’s directed her way has blown her out of proportion, and neither one of them is quite sure what to do about it. She’s so busy being a miracle that she has a hard time just living her life.
“What a shame,” Green writes and Quentin realizes, “to believe that a person is more than a person.” In interviews Green has referred to this idea, that Quentin is gazing at Margo in a way that asks her to be a miracle, a mystery, an adventure, and not a person, as the “romantic gaze”. When Quentin looks at Margo, and Margo looks at herself, they are both wearing movie glasses, seeing evoked feelings and possible camera shots instead of an actual woman doing actual things.
John Green has a reputation as one of the best chroniclers of teenage life. And he is. His characters reckon with love and heartbreak, with pondering who they are and how they fit into the world. Their reckonings are made even more poignant because it is the first time they’re experiencing and thinking about these things. But John Green is also a great chronicler of what it is like to be a teenager right now, in an age filled with more stories than a single human could ever comprehend. And he knows that those stories don’t tend to serve women well. Paper Towns is a story about the first time that a teenage boy found himself in love (or something close). But it’s also a story about finding yourself in love for the first time and having that experience feel like it could somehow be a hazy memory.
When someone describes an experience as ‘like a movie’, it’s usually this feeling they’re describing. A first date isn’t like a movie because you went to a similar restaurant and did similar activities to an actual film you saw Julia Roberts and Hugh Grant in. It’s like a movie because the date pushed the same buttons, and gave you the same feelings, that watching a falling-in-love montage in a billion movies does. Having those buttons pushed makes it feel like you have a hazy memory of experiences that you’ve never lived and that you know the plot of a movie you aren’t actually starring in. The culture we live in encourages little boys like Quentin and little girls like me to believe that their lives should be like the movies. It took reading Paper Towns for me to realize what a disservice I would do to myself if I became someone else’s miracle.
Learning to see others complexly goes beyond the disservices stories do to women. After one of the clues involve a famous photo of Woodie Guthrie, Quentin realizes what I’ve come to know; seeing people outside of the movies is the only machine that kills fascists.
It is all too easy to reduce our current events to a movie script. It can be one type of story, one where Trump is a boor and a punchline, and the people who voted for him are even bigger jokes. It can be another, where the rally in Charlottesville is rising action, designed to let us know that the world is getting darker and the heroes are just about to emerge. It can be a story where the politicians are slimy, corrupt villains, whose sole goal in life is to crush the little guy. It can be a story about World War III.
But looking at political situations through movie glasses does just as big a disservice to your fellow Americans as Quentin was doing to Margo. What a shame to think a person is more than a person. Quentin and Margo learned to see people, good or bad, as people. We can too.
Should Higher Education Be Preparing Students to Not Have a Job?
It’s 5:15 on a Tuesday and I’m standing on a busy DC street corner. I’ve called my mother, yet again, and I’m getting teary eyed and choked up thinking about my future, yet again. I hate to say it, but this same scene could have played four years ago, during my freshman year of college. The content would be different-- then I would have been worried about my inability to make an immediate best friend at college, now I’m worried about my inability to land a full time job. Then I was shuffling through friend groups, now I’m shuffling through temp positions. The content may have changed, but the tone is exactly the same. Teary, worried, nostalgic, a little whiny, a lot confused. Freshman year of life indeed.
On this particular Tuesday, the reason I’m upset is a little different. Normally my complaints center around my embarrassment when I run into friends with full-time positions, the difficulties of not having the type of health insurance that allows you to actually go to the doctor, or my continual confusions about LinkedIn.
This time the worry is bigger. It’s occurred to me that maybe the reason I can’t seem to find full-time work is simply because there isn’t any. And I am freaking out.
My mom thinks I’m being silly. Well, specifically, she thinks that I might have a point about automation of labor being a problem, but that it will be a problem for someone else, in the future. Certainly it’s not my problem now. When I point out self-driving cars, she says this proves her point. It’s someone else’s problem. Machines aren’t replacing the jobs of the college-educated, like me and like her. I should calm down, send out more applications, and go to at least one networking event a week. Focus, and stop being silly.
While I am aware I’m being dramatic and weepy, (and possibly a little snotty about some rather good advice) when I look at my post-grad situation, it certainly doesn’t seem like I’m being silly. The shifts in the labor force that technology is causing feel very much like my problems. And I’m left wondering whether higher education prepared me to handle them.
There have been rumblings of workforce changes for years, but, just as I’ve graduated, they are starting to come to fruition. Google has developed a self-driving car, and Uber is working towards running an automated fleet. This one technology alone is expected to endanger millions of jobs. But this isn’t just a disruption affecting low-education, low-skill jobs. Tech’s tendency to ensure that fewer people can do less work, even in high-education, high-skill jobs. As a result, traditional lifetime employment is becoming a relic and 40% of US workers are contingent.
In his book on the future of work, Raising the Floor, former SEIU President Andy Stern interviews Honeywell CEO David M. Cote about these trends. Cote isn’t worried about the future of work. He, like a lot of others, is confident that jobs will come because they always have and that the best course of action when confronted with a worrying statistic is to ensure that more Americans are studying STEM subjects.
When asked how new technologies are impacting Honeywell now, he says that his company is putting more intelligence on the machine. “A year ago,” Stern writes, “his human resource managers were asked to deconstruct the job of HR specialist into its component tasks. They determined that 65% of those tasks could be computerized.”
That sentence makes my heart stop. Human Resources has always seemed to me one of the most human oriented jobs out there. I’ve always assumed that it largely has to do with people and is therefore in the safe-zone when it comes to automation. It turns out that this isn’t true. Most jobs consist of some sort of balance between providing relationships and providing information. Relationships cannot be easily automated, but information can be. And relationships only come through time in a career. The 65% percent of an HR job that can be automated is what is done at the entry level.
And so I’m on the phone, telling my mom about this, and about other studies I’ve read. Telling her that I’m worried technology is automating away the full-time entry level job at just the time I need one. Instead I am a part of the new, cool free-agent, gig economy. I have a ‘gig’ as a temp. I freelance on the side, on my own time, making money whenever I have freetime. Theoretically, this means that I have more freedom, more choices, and more time for vacations. I’m not chained to a desk and shackled to just one career. But I don’t feel free. I feel like a failure.
At my (old) school, there were posters everywhere which showed an infographic. There were 100 little people, and most of them, a staggering amount of them really, are filled in. 91% of AU students have a full time job or are in grad school within six months of graduation, it says. You’d walk past them on your way to class, see them as you walked back from your job.
I understand why they were everywhere. The percentage of students who are in a full time job (or in graduate school) is an important component of US college rankings. So that is what the career centers focus on. How to apply for and land full-time jobs, and how to apply for and get into grad schools. Or programs like the peace-corp and Fulbright. But there’s very little emphasis on what 40% of Americans are now doing. No pamphlets on how to determine the best freelancing website. No free workshops on the right amount of time to stay at a temp job.
It left me, at least, feeling unprepared for what I’ve encountered in the post-grad job market. It’s setting students up to feel like failures for being caught up in sweeping economic changes. And it’s not a problem for the future. It’s a problem I’m having right now.
My school was proud of how many of its students found success after their undergraduate programs. That’s why the posters with the infographic were everywhere. The school wanted to be clear on the end goal, on what we were working towards. To remind us that higher education, at least partially, is about ensuring that you were one of the well-defined, filled-in people, and not one of the white, blank, empty ones.
By the time an American child completes elementary school they’ll have witnessed 8,000 murders. And they’ll have seen 100,000 other acts of violence, including rape and assault, before hitting middle school.1
Of course, these aren’t real acts of violence. They’re fictional. They are made up of the dreams of actors and directors, sewn together with makeup and choreography and fake guns. But these numbers don’t include all of the very real violence that automatically makes the televised news. They don’t include all of the murders and rapes alluded to and discussed on TV shows like Law and Order SVU. They don’t include all of the ways that violence permeates US society, coming at Americans in their living rooms through a glowing screen.
Television shapes how viewers see the world. As a form of mass communication, TV has become a common symbolic environment. Across the US, people can remember that Ross and Rachel were on a break and that Michael Scott was a terrible boss. The common symbolic environment extends beyond fiction as well. Americans can recognize George Zimmerman’s voice on the telephone with the police and Bill Clinton’s exact cadence in his denial of his extramarital activities just as easily. Our collective stories are told across the screen.
The stories we see and hear about on television layer on top of one another. Humans understand their world through shortcuts. We piece things together and we make assumptions to try to make processing the world a little bit easier. One of the ways we cut corners on evaluating what information is important for us to know is by evaluating what information is easy for us to grab. Psychologists call this shortcut the availability heuristic. If it easily recalled, we reason, that’s probably because it is worth recalling.
Researchers at Ohio State University wanted to study how well people understood what was and was not actually dangerous. They asked participants in a study to evaluate the probability of potential causes of death. Their perceptions of how they were likely to die not at all align with the reality of the situation. The subjects said airplane accidents and homicides seemed likely, while heart disease and car accidents did not. The reality is nearly the opposite. Heart disease and car accidents are both top-ten causes of death for Americans. Airplane accidents and homicides don’t even come close.
Airplane accidents and homicides are sensational stories. Because they are so sensational whenever there is an airplane accident or a homicide, the media covers it extensively. But heart disease and car accidents aren’t sensational. The media doesn’t cover them. Our brains get fooled. It is easier to recall Sully Sullenberger landing perilously on the Hudson Bay than it is to remember the last car accident you drove past.
The brain codes what is easy to remember as important to remember. Sensational, violent stories are easy to remember. Your brain starts to layer these important stories, one on top of the other, until a structure starts to emerge. That structure becomes a worldview.
Lyndon B. Johnson was terrified of what that worldview might be. In 1968, with the country reeling from the tumultuous years between the assassinations of JFK and Martin Luther King Jr, he formed the National Commission on the Causes and Preventions of Violence. The commission set up task forces to study violence in nearly all its forms: individual violence, violence in American history, group violence, law enforcement etc. But one of the task forces he, and other political leaders of the 1960s, were most excited about was on media and violence. Politicians of the 1960s were concerned about just what, exactly, all of this television was doing to Americans.
George Gerbner and Larry Gross were put in charge of the singular study commissioned by the task force: the Cultural Indicators Project. The Cultural Indicators Project was designed to examine the effects and implications of television consumption in the long term and lasted from 1968 until the late 1970s. But the study was kicked off with a survey.
Gerbner sent out a survey whereupon he asked respondents about their viewing habits and then asked them about their opinions about civically important ideas. Gerbner sorted his viewers into three categories. Light viewers watched less than two hours, medium viewers watched two-to-four and heavy viewers watched four or more.2
The more television respondents reported watching, the meaner the world around them seemed. Responding to Gerbner’s survey, the light viewers predicted their weekly odds of being a victim of a crime at 1 in 100. The heavy viewers said 1 in 10. The actual odds are about 1 in 10,000. The heavy viewers were also more suspicious of other people’s motives. They were far more likely to agree with statements such as, “Most people are just looking out for themselves” or “In dealing with others, you can’t be too careful”.3
It isn’t as simple as saying that television directly leads to paranoia. Rather, television places images from your real life directly next to fictional images. When your brain is trying to recall examples to evaluate, both types of images are readily available. It isn’t just that the world seems meaner. Your brain evaluates the world around you in such a way that the world, as you see it, is actually meaner.
Gerbner explains both the phenomena itself and his fears about it, saying that, “Our surveys tell us that the more television people watch, the more they are likely to be afraid to go out on the street in their own community, especially at night. They are afraid of strangers and meeting other people. A hallmark of civilization, which is kindness to strangers, has been lost.”4
This, in a nutshell, is what is troubling about mean world syndrome. When Americans live in a meaner world, they react to that meaner world. Those reactions range from the National Crime Prevention Council advising parents to tell kids that “No, Go, Yell, Tell” is the proper reaction to being approached by a stranger (any stranger) to voting for politicians who vow to toughen up the system to prevent crime that isn’t really happening. Living in a mean world causes the inhabitants of it to feel vulnerable. And increased vulnerability leads to wanting more (and more and more) protection.
This is the fear that drives voter ID laws. Not accepting Syrian refugees. Mandatory minimum sentencing. The relentless pressure on judges and politicians to be tough on crime. The need to have guns for self-protection. It’s the fear that labels unpopular politicians as “Hitler”. The fear that pits neighbor against neighbor and teaches children to fear difference.
America understands itself through ideals. We write ourselves in as the land of the free and the home of the brave. The more frightened we get, the less free we want to be. The meaner the world around us gets, the less American we want to be.
In the USA, we have a problem. The whole system, and everyone in it, is crooked. They’re bought. Just listen to the candidates in this election.
Gallup polls in 2015 found that 3 out of 4 Americans perceive government corruption in the US as rampant, that corrupt US officials are as common as rats in New York City. And this, according to quite a few Americans, is absolutely terrifying. The annual Chapman University Survey of American Fears found that of the 89 potential fears asked about, the highest percentage of Americans agreed that corruption of federal officials was something to be very afraid of. In fact, 58% of Americans are afraid or very afraid of their corrupt government.
But what exactly are all of these people afraid of? In 2016, Americans use the word with enough frequency to render it meaningless. We know Reagan was corrupt when he sold weapons to the Contras, and we know that Richard M. Daley, former mayor of Chicago, was probably corrupt when it wasn’t clear where millions came from or went to in his Millennium Park project. And some people think Bill Clinton was corrupt for lying under oath or that Ted Cruz was for forcing a government shutdown. And then still others think that Nebraska Senator Ben Nelson was corrupt for changing his Obamacare vote in exchange for changing the language around abortion and better funding Nebraska’s Medicaid switchovers. Or that Sarah Palin was decidedly uncorrupt when she turned down the “Bridge to Nowhere”.
Trying to define that corrupt government is easy, until you try to define it. Corruption is when the government does things that aren’t good for the people, when it does things that make your gut twinge. It’s easy to perceive and yet hard to describe. No policy is good for all of the people. And politics is, by definition, only for those with strong guts.
Transparency International, a global coalition against corruption, defines corruption as “the abuse of entrusted power for private gain,” which allows for acts to be considered corrupt and abusive without necessarily being crimes. Essentially, something is considered corrupt when public power is used for private interests.
It doesn’t seem like it, but that’s a very different definition of corruption than Americans used to have. Lincoln Steffens’ The Shame of the Cities, which details corruption in America’s cities at the turn of the century, tells story after story about individual dishonesty and bloated graft. The famous muckraker’s columns were filled with that type of corruption.
But what Steffens doesn’t tell is even more important. To Americans of the past, switching funds around, like Reagan, was just politics. Lying about affairs, like Clinton, was just polite, and shutting down the government simply unheard of. And changing your votes in exchange for funds, like Nelson did and Palin did not, that was just the pork barrel.
The pork barrel* is what we call the appropriation of federal funds to local interests. Like tacking on funds for a new bridge in Delaware to a national bill that raised taxes. Pork used to be considered a normal part of political operation. If you wanted to do something big, like Medicare, you convinced other politicians to vote for it by tacking on all sorts of little things that they could point to when their constituents asked them what exactly they’ve been doing for the past few years.
Pork allowed politicians to risk voting for unpopular policy because it gave them ways beyond federal policy to improve their constituents’ lives.
But the USA has turned against pork barrel spending. In the 1990s, as Jonathan Rauch details in Political Realism, Republican congress members, led by Newt Gingrich, gleefully demolished Congressional seniority and appropriations systems. Pork barrel spending didn’t go away entirely. But it mutated into something far less functional.
Getting rid of pork as we’d traditionally known it has led to political stagnation. Politicians no longer have room to make deals with one another. Jonathan Rauch explains it best when he says
when I began covering Washington as a journalist in the 1980s, I found a system which seemed to me at the time, not just in hindsight, to be unruly but surprisingly functional. On big, hard issues like Social Security and immigration and taxation, it more often than not achieved reasonable results; on everyday matters like appropriations and farm bills, it ticked along fairly reliably.
The Congress Rauch describes is nothing like the Congress Americans have been experiencing for the past few years. Congress right now doesn’t function well on big issues, like health care, or small issues, like farm bills. Or even budgets, day-to-day function, or passing bills.
Some political scientists, like Rauch, are calling to bring back pork. But we shouldn’t look at the past with rose colored glasses— rampant, fatty pork did bring terrible things with it. Blatant misuse of funds does drain resources.
Clearly, you want politicians to be able to do one another favors. But you want to be able to control what those favors are. We want politicians to be able to promise one another roads in exchange for policy. We don’t want them to be able to promise the over inflation of budgets (with the extra money lining certain pockets) or a job for somebody’s brother. Getting rid of pork completely gets rid of both types of favors. Trimming the fat from pork and having more control over what the favors are keeps the good meat and gets rid of the waste.
Trimming the fat from pork is a great metaphor** but a difficult policy lever to pull. A favor comes with two parts—there is what you do, and then there is when you do it. So far, we’ve focused on trying to limit what politicians can do and we’ve gone too far. Instead we should focus on when politicians can do it. If, for example, Congress created a list of infrastructure projects that needed to be done in the next five years, with the understanding that funding would be given for, say, five projects a year. Politicians could trade around favors to get their state’s projects into one of the five slots per year. But after the project is done, it’s off the list. Acknowledging that any reform of pork still needs to leave wiggle room for favors keeps the good meat and cuts out the fat of the pork system.
Corruption is what happens when private interest trumps public interest. But in the battle against pork, we have, at times, forgotten what the public interest is. It’s in the public interest to have a Congress that can get things done. And sometimes getting things done requires doing favors. In order to forge a more perfect union, we have to rethink our definition of corruption to be about what’s truly in the public interest. Which includes a higher level of functionality.
*not to be confused with pork belly (thank you Wikipedia)
Chicken or Fish? Why Americans Suddenly Started Eating Tilapia
You can buy between 300 and 500 different species of fish and shellfish across the USA. We smother crab legs in butter, sear Mahi-Mahi gently glazed in ginger, brew scallops into creamy soups; seafood yields us boundless opportunities. But even with all these options, 55% of seafood eaten in the US is one of three products: shrimp, salmon, or canned tuna.
Which is why the sudden addition of a fourth fish—tilapia—to our pallets in the last decade seems so dramatic. It is about as revolutionary as the expansion of our sports preferences beyond football, baseball, and basketball.
Well, kind of. Unlike every other fish in the US, tilapia has skyrocketed in popularity in the past decade. But people love to eat it precisely because it is the least fishy fish you can find. And an unfishy fish is exactly what Americans wanted.
A decade or so ago, most people had never even heard of tilapia. In fact, the World Aquaculture Society found that in 2000, Americans ate only .03 lbs of tilapia per capita per year. By 2012, we were eating 1.4 lbs a year. In a little over ten years, Americans are eating 5 times more tilapia than they used to. Tilapia had moved from an unknown fish to one that US grocery stores were selling nearly $150 a week of.
Consuming 1.4 pounds a year of something doesn’t sound like much. But, when you look at how much fish we eat every year, it’s actually pretty significant. See, Americans don’t really eat fish. In 2014, we consumed 14.6 lbs per capita. Compare that to the 53.5 pounds of beef, the 57.7 pounds of chicken, and the over 480 pounds of vegetables we grilled, fried, and roasted per capita that year. Consumption reports show that we eat two times as much cheese per capita than fish, and cheese, mind you, typically isn’t a main course (unless you’re from Wisconsin, that is).
Comparatively, our dislike for fish stands out. In the rest of the world, 2012 marked the first time that the global volume of farmed fish exceeded the global volume of beef. Asia alone accounts for over two-thirds of global fish consumption and European and Oceanic consumption has risen at a more dramatic rate than American consumption has.
Our Yankee distaste for fish was pretty constant. For nearly 80 years, Americans ate, on average, approximately 11.3 pounds of fish every year. But when the 90s hit, national concerns about fat, cholesterol, and heart disease got louder. Additionally, the worldwide sushi fad had solidly taken hold at this point and Americans started to see fish, specifically sushi, as cosmopolitan and cultured.
USDA data shows that we began to eat more meat overall but the meat we ate was leaner. We had started to substitute our Ribeyes and hotdogs for poultry and fish. By 1990 Americans were eating 15.3 pounds of fish a year. We kept on eating until 2004, where we peaked at 16.6 pounds, until dropping down to the roughly 14.3 we eat now.
Even so, Americans still didn’t like fish that was all that fishy. As Paul Greenberg, bestselling author of Four Fish put it in an interview with NPR, “whenever [industry professionals] try and figure out why it is Americans won’t eat more seafood, the three issues that come up again and again are I don’t know what to do with it, I don’t want to touch it and I don’t want to it smelling up my kitchen.” People were saying they didn’t like the ocean taste, the flaky texture, the slightly overwhelming diversity of species and recipes available—basically everything that makes fish fish. To a connoisseur, these fish characteristics are exactly what make fish exciting. But to the average American participating in a focus group, fish aren’t exciting. They’re confusing, they’re icky to touch, and somewhere, always, they leave the worry that dinner will leave a distinct odor behind. But then, there is tilapia.
Tilapia is also not exciting. It has long been known throughout the industry as “aquatic chicken” because it breeds easily and tastes bland. Genetic engineering has improved upon both of these natural tendencies to make a fish that is even more like chicken. Scientists created an industrial strain of tilapia through selective breeding—bigger fish, fleshier, with smaller heads and tails. More efficient intestines to help turn the tilapia’s already omnivorous diet into one of exclusively veggie pellets. Not too different than chicken feed.
When you have consumers who prefer chicken, and a fish that is as close to chicken as a fish can get, the next step is to let consumers know that. Tilapia producers, like Regal Springs Tilapia, took steps to do so.
In store tilapia was cut to look like chicken. Instead of selling whole fish, complete still with eyes and fins, it became more common to see hand cut fillets. Both buyers and sellers started to value better trims at the margin, for a more consistent appearance. Instead of a fish, consumers were purchasing a light pink square cut piece of meat.
istributors improved the packaging to counteract issues consumers had with fish from the start. Tilapia used to be sold in sealed plastic bags, with the shiny scales of the fish still visible, or the pink flesh squelching under the tight seal. Frankly, it did look unpleasant to touch. Distributors moved to boxes, which showed cooked tilapia—brown, on the grill, battered, or covered in spices. It looked delicious, like a full meal that probably smelled amazing. They began to put recipes on the back and side of the boxes, showing consumers that they could make all of their favorite chicken recipes using this savory new meat. If consumers didn’t know what to do with their product, distributors were going to tell them what to do with it. Namely, the exact same things Americans had been doing with chicken for years.
The determination to prove to Americans that tilapia was not a fishy fish went so far that supermarkets carried boxes which boasted of the delicious “tilapia loins” inside—even though fish have about as many loins as they do wings.
Like with every choice consumers make, many factors were at play in causing Americans to eat more tilapia—health concerns, prices, the rise of fish farming technology, and the loss of salmon runs. But, there is also no doubt that Americans added a fourth fish to their diets because marketers gave us what we wanted—and convinced us we were basically eating chicken.
The narrative I have most frequently been offered when it comes to violence in sex, violence in dating has a victim and a villain. The victim is usually a woman. The villain is usually a man.
These are the Lifetime movies. The stories People Magazine sometimes puts on the cover, usually heralded by a yearbook photo. My grandmother will cluck her tongue at these stories and say something about ‘the poor girl’ in them. The stories that are unbearably thrilling because they are fucked up fairy tales. Adult stories that have sex, violence, and a bad guy.
But when I’ve seen violence occur in dating or violence in sex, the story has never been that simple. The man and the woman just won’t fit neatly into the roles I’ve been presented with. She’s not a damsel in distress. He’s not a man in a mask.
Instead, they are people. And in the worst moments of this type of violence that I’ve seen, they are people whose meeting is less like a fairy tale and more like an explosion. Two people who do not have their shit together, one whirling around in a never ending swirl of want and need and pain and dysfunction, the other with dysfunction bubbling up from within, constantly simmering, ready to explode at a moment’s notice.
That narrative is a lot more complicated than the Lifetime movie about the big, bad man who hits the tiny, vulnerable woman.
That narrative is more like what Eminem and Rhianna tell in Love the Way You Lie. A tornado meets a volcano. Pain and violence and destruction all around.
At least in my experience, which is, admittedly only as an observer and not even a particularly close observer, it’s those stories that are closer to the truth. Stories that go beyond the victim and the villain and instead look at the absolute mess left over after an abusive relationship happens. Stories that paint people and not fairytale characters always hit closer to home.
But they are also dangerous.
Julianne Smolinski’s essay for The Cut, The Funny Thing About Abusive Relationships talks about how common it is for women in comedy to be in abusive relationships. She wrote it in response to Beth Stelling’s posts about rape and abuse in a past relationship. And she pointed out that, “anybody can go through what Beth did. Your wisest, strongest, cleverest, sharpest friend. Your funniest. If anything, your funniest friend is probably more likely to have one of these stories than not.”
And the world she describes, where as a funny women she is so used to making jokes out of the horrendous that she laughed about her boyfriend threatening to kill her, doesn’t fit into a Lifetime movie. Because women aren’t supposed to laugh about this stuff. It’s supposed to come solely from him being evil and not at all from her being insecure, or wanting to laugh about something instead of fix it. Finding it easier to craft a joke than a solution.
To be clear here, I am not at all trying to imply that her boyfriend nearly choking her to death (which happens later on in the essay) is at all Julianne Smolinski’s fault. When you abuse your partner, when you hurt them, or intimidate them, or scare them, it is wrong and you are wrong.
And the clarification I just made is exactly why these stories are dangerous. Because the real life stories are often so complicated and fucked up that they don’t seem to have a good lesson. When you tell a story about two people sliding off the edge together into an abyss of awful together, it doesn’t make anyone’s grandma cluck their tongue.
But when you tell a story like that, the point isn’t driven home as hard. The point, of course, is that you shouldn’t hit your partner. That if you abuse them, or hurt them, or intimidate them, it is wrong and you are wrong.
That point is important, it is so so so important.
And with something as important as that, I can’t help but wonder…..do we need the clear cut stories? Is there some higher value than truth being served here? Is there a point of telling a story beyond illuminating what the truth is?
“If we broke up the big banks tomorrow…..would that end racism? Would that end sexism?” Hilary Clinton asked in her closing statement at the most recent democratic debate. Her implied answer was no. She was trying to paint Bernie Sanders as a single-issue candidate.
As she put it in Nevada, “not everything is about an economic theory”. And according to her stump speech, issues like racism and sexism are examples of that.
She is correct that Bernie Sanders talks about big banks in reams and scads. He talks about the rigged economy and Wall Street. And he certainly talks about the millionaires and the billionaires.
If one were a college student, and were so inclined, one could almost make a drinking game out of his use of those phrases. You know. If one were so inclined.
It’s easy to see where Hilary’s attack comes from. But I don’t buy it. The movement for racial equality and the movement for gender equality have gone through somewhat parallel waves. First, there was a push for legal equality. In the case of racial equality, the push for legal equality resulted in the abolition of slavery, the 13th amendment, and the 14th amendment. In the case of gender equality, the push for legal equality resulted in the 19th amendment.
But, it turns out that laws can only move so far towards equality. So both movements pushed for social equality as well. For racial equality, this push was the civil rights movement. It had two parts—first, to end segregation of the races and second, to end people of color’s deeply entrenched hatred of themselves.
Gender equality’s push had two parts as well. First, to end the separation of the spheres men and women were allowed to occupy. And second, to end women’s deeply entrenched derision of themselves, femininity and female sexuality.
Neither movement has ever pushed for economic equality.
According to the Washington Post, “the median household net worth for whites was $110,729 in 2010”. For Hispanics, it was $7,424. For blacks, $4,995. 1 The ratio is nearly 15 to 1. In today’s America, a white person is statistically 15 times richer than a black or Hispanic person.*
When it comes to gender, Mariko Chang, a former sociology professor at Harvard University, found that single women have only 32 cents of wealth for every dollar owned by men.**
More women and people of color work in part-time positions or in contract jobs. Women and people of color are more likely to be working minimum wage. And they are more likely to be single parents, so that more people are supported on less income.** And young women and people of color shoulder more student debt than other demographics.***
Wealth inequality, which is what Bernie addresses when he says to close the big banks, affects every American. Our widening economic inequality isn’t good for any American, even those who seem to be coming out on top. But economic inequality affects some Americans more than others. And economic inequality is worse for some Americans than others.
No, closing the big banks will not eradicate sexism and racism tomorrow. But closing the big banks will be a step towards more economic equality. It will be a new push in the movement towards equality. It will be a push in a new direction. It will help smash one of the most pernicious and difficult aspects of inequality in America.
Have you ever played that game with friends where you try to guess what you would be doing during historical time periods? Maybe you’re not quite dorky enough to find this as amusing as I do, but I play all the time.
If we lived in the Elizabethan era, my best friend would have owned the classiest brothel in London. If we lived during World War II, my other friend would be working on the Manhattan Project. If we lived on the frontier, I’d be a one-room school teacher.
But we never play, “What would you be doing during the civil rights movement?”
Well, we played once. With a group of friends, including an ex-boyfriend of mine. He said that he would have been a Freedom Rider, dropping out of school to head to Alabama with the protesters to march, march, march.
It got very quiet after he said this. I told him, no, he wouldn’t. Because if he lived during the civil rights era, he would be doing exactly what he was doing then. Sitting in school and supporting from afar.
Forty-two percent of black children are educated in schools in high-poverty areas, according to The Guardian. Forty seven percent of black students face unemployment if they drop out of high school, compared to 26 percent for white students. Black people make up 37 percent of the homeless population, despite being just 13.2% of the U.S. population. One in13 eligible black voters faces voting bans because of felony convictions. That’s four times the rate of disenfranchised voters for every other racial group.
Those are statistics from 2015. These are the inequalities that exist now. And there are protests going on, same as there were in the 1960s. Protests in Ferguson, in Baltimore, at the University of Missouri.
Which means that, and if you are like me, you have to come to terms with the fact that if you are not an AU student who is participating in this civil rights movement, you probably wouldn’t be a student who participated in the last civil rights movement.
What is my point here?
My point is that you should be doing more for this movement. And I should be doing more for this movement. But I’m not. Because I have a job, and another job, and classes, and friends, and a budget and a billion other things on my plate.
So what does that mean?
That means that supporting this movement from the sidelines, the way I am, the way a lot of students are, contributes to the problem. My words support #BlackLivesMatter. But my actions don’t. My actions say my job, my other job, my classes, my friends, my budget and everything else on my plate matter more than black lives.
I really wish this column could be about me saying that I am going to become a #BlackLivesMatter activist tomorrow.
But it’s not, because I know myself better than that. And I know that my support will remain in my words, and my actions will continue to be directed towards paying my bills, learning my subjects and having fun with my friends.
But the hard truth is I am part of the problem. And if you support #BlackLivesMatter without doing anything for #BlackLivesMatter, so are you. Because you too are saying other things matter more than black lives.
If I think that, why do I think it’s okay for me to still say I probably won’t become an activist tomorrow? It’s the same reason that I don’t donate part of every paycheck to life saving charities, the same reason I don’t attend as many climate change rallies as I could.
It’s because I have a rather vague feeling that all of these people can’t really be making sweeping changes. It’s because even though I don’t think it’s okay, I can comfortably ignore how not okay my actions actually are.
So I am making myself uncomfortable with it. And I hope I’m making you uncomfortable too. Because I am part of the problem. And if your words support #BlackLivesMatter but your actions do not, so are you.
Shelby Ostergaard is a senior in the School of Public Affairs. She blogs at shelbyostergaard.com.
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