My Words Trickle Down

Sorry, I guess I promised to write this over a month ago. Part 1 is entirely unrelated and can be found here

So, after my day to day life fell apart, I started looking around for some new direction. Long-time readers will remember how, well before finishing my degree, I was already regretting not pursuing my childhood passion of Zoology instead of following my nose into Philosophy -- but by that point it was already too late to switch degrees, since I couldn't afford another two years of undergrad, which is the minimum it would've taken to switch, assuming they'd even have let me do so. After finishing my degree, I started looking around for ways to somehow shoe-horn it into some sort of scientific discipline, mostly unsuccessfully. Besides which, I'd found that I pretty much couldn't afford any kind of further study, since I would still be classed as an "overseas" student until I had been resident for three years "not primarily for the purpose of education".

Such were the rules then, or seemed to be, but looking around from my depressed stupor this past winter, I realised that, come September, I would fulfill that criterion, and so could perhaps afford to study again. I started looking around excitedly for options. It turns out that science test-scores and qualifications have what a local college advisor called an "expiration date", meaning I would have to take a mature students access course to get into university to do a second undergrad in Zoology, which seemed like the best idea at the time. I signed up. I've got an interview for it, still upcoming, but I don't think I'll be able to afford to actually do the course, because SCOTTISH "HOME STUDENT" CATEGORY REGULATIONS ARE FUCKING INSANE.

Yeah, I said it. FUCKING INSANE. Why? Because apparently it's not enough to meet the three-years' residence requirement; I must also be in a visa category called "settled", which I won't be able to get for another year and a half. However, EEA/EU citizens and their "relevant family members" are considered home students, if they've met the residence requirement. Well, hey, I thought, that's me! I'm married to an EEA/EU citizen! The UK is in the EU, after all. Nope. Turns out that that comes from some sort of law about EU parity between countries, and they don't actually have to apply it to their own citizens (unless they have "exercised their right of residence" in another EU country by living there for 3 months or more).

The upshot of this is that despite having lived here for seven years (three as a non-student), I cannot be considered a home student in Scotland precisely BECAUSE my Scottish spouse has only lived in Scotland and has never taken his taxable economic activity to another EU country.

Fucking madness.

It's worth noting, incidentally, that even if I wanted to go back to the US to study, I would of course no longer qualify for in-state tuition in NC, either. I ain't got no home-student status in this world anymore.

In a discussion about the evolution of language over on aberwyn's journal, someone posted a link to this article, which calls for a complete retirement of the phrase 'chink in [one's] armor' -- indeed, the word 'chink' altogether -- because of the association with its racial slur homonym.

The author, Huan Hsu, discusses a recent controversy over an ESPN headline which used the phrase "A Chink in the Armor" to describe Taiwanese-American rising star basketball player Jeremy Lin. I say "controversy", though I never actually saw any of it (I don't really follow sports news); I'm not sure what controversy there could be. It was obviously offensive, it was pointed out, and ESPN took it down, apologised, and suspended the writer responsible. However, let's take a closer look at exactly why it was offensive -- and why I'd argue that it is not, as Hsu suggests, anything inherent to the word 'chink' itself. That is, it's offensive because it is using the ordinary meaning of the word 'chink' to deliberately invoke the racial slur.

Headline writers seem to be drawn to puns like bees to nectar (or flies to shit, depending on your level of cynicism). For the most part this is pretty harmless, but the thing about puns is they create a joke, and if you're making a joke you need to be, y'know, self-aware and sensitive enough to not be offensive. You need to bear in mind who or what you're making fun of with your double meaning. Compare, for instance, the flurry of "Santorum Surges from Behind" during the ex-senator's recent presidential bid: in that case, the butt of the joke (heh) is Santorum himself, and the winking double meaning refers to the disgusting redefinition of his name in response to his rampant homophobia. Whereas the winking double meaning in "A Chink in the Armor" is "LOL Asian people amirite?" Besides, much more simply: when you make a pun on a racial slur, you are using a racial slur.

That's really all there is to it. There is one good reason to avoid using that phrase, namely that it's clichéd and tiresome. But that 'chink' is a homonym of a racial slur should not disqualify it from use entirely. Plus it's avoidance is apparently leading to horrendous abuses of both language and logic like "a kink in the armor" -- which just sounds rather, um, painful. Ouch.

EDIT (June): I keep thinking about this post, and am starting to regret writing it a bit. Not the basic point, but the tone of it -- because it makes me wonder if I'm just yet another white person defending a racial slur on questionable grounds. I hope I was absolutely clear in repudiating the ESPN headline as OBVIOUS RACISM. Though I do still think that there's a difference between this and using the word in one of its (few, rather limited) legitimate ways: as a succinct way to describe a small gap or fissure in masonry or armour. Anyway, it's always terribly obvious when someone is using a word that sounds like a racial slur in order to deliberately invoke that racial slur. SO OBVIOUS (as, for instance, in the UK, where it is common to refer to cigarettes as 'fags', nobody has any trouble telling the difference between discussion of cigarettes and people making homophobic slurs).

Besides, there is a salient difference in both precise semantic reference and connotation between, e.g., 'niggardly' and 'stingy', or between 'chink' and 'small gap' or 'weakness'; the reason I get so het up about all this is sheer ire at racists stealing away the subtle expressive powers of my language by sullying certain words with their garbage.

Or: why we still need feminism.

This article: http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2012/mar/12/twitters-tales-of-sexism makes a good point, I think. It's about how the author made some offhand twitter comments about What Has Feminism Done For Us? (answer: loads), and got treated to a deluge of replies about just how bad things were back in the Bad Old Days ... and also some that she describes as "surprisingly recent". The takeaway message, I think, is this:

"Worse things happen to women every day including rape and domestic violence, than being snubbed or ignored. These horrors indicate the continuing vast inequality between the sexes. No, it's not the worst thing in the world, but that doesn't mean you can pretend it's not happening."

Little (and "little") things, irritating things, things that "don't really matter", all contribute to an atmosphere of oppression, even when they are not, themselves, inherently oppressive.

__________

Meanwhile, yesterday, Twitter was trending the hashtag #ididnotreport, which is/was a mixture of people sharing their stories of unreported sexual assaults alongside the "small", "insignificant", "everyday" sorts of sexual harassment that is a part of many women's daily experience, and all women's lifetime experience, but which is generally ignored, and certainly de-emphasised, by the wider culture.

Discuss.

Cross-posted from my less personal blog. If you want to link please use this one: http://mhuzzell.wordpress.com/2011/11/03/rape-culture-and-the-occupy-x-protests/

Like many feminists, I've been incredibly dismayed not only at the flood of reports of sexual harassment, assault and even rape in the Occupy camps, but also at many of the Occupiers' responses to them. It is, of course, completely unacceptable for the camps to distance themselves from women who have been raped, and to shame and chastise them for even thinking of taking action to protect themselves in the way that they've been taught to their whole lives -- namely, calling the police. And it is absolutely shameful that so many of these incidents have been intentionally downplayed or even hidden by the protesters in an attempt to keep the movement from "looking bad" (as if it didn't look worse to simply ignore the sexual harassment problems).

However, I have also been disappointed by the response of some of those who have been similarly appalled by the situation. Sadly, many of the articles and commentaries voicing a strong critique of the sexual safety within the camps, and the camps' responses to them, have proposed the same dead-end solution: end the occupations.

This response seems kind of bizarre when you compare the situation to many analogous ones, which don't involve protests. If someone is sexually harassed or assaulted within a company, for instance, no one expects that company to be dissolved; they expect the perpetrator to be dealt with and the organization itself to continue. Or at more physically similar events -- say, a large outdoor concert, or one of these music festivals the kids are all so fond of these days -- when someone is raped or sexually assaulted, the situation is dealt with, and the show goes on. And in ordinary life, if, say, one person rapes another in a dark alley, WE BLAME THE RAPIST, NOT THE DARK ALLEY. Or at least we should, because blaming the physical situation is really, really uncomfortably close to blaming the victim h/erself.

Furthermore, it is not clear to me what, exactly, ending the occupations would accomplish other than muffling the voices of thousands of rightfully angry citizens. The sad truth is that, in a misogynistic society such as we live in, any situation in which women are placed in vulnerable positions, in crowds, and especially where they are sleeping in relatively exposed places, many will take this opportunity to sexually assault them (and some men, too). I am not a fatalist; I do not think this is in any way 'inevitable', nor do I think that the fact that it does happen is an excuse for allowing it to. However, it is important to acknowledge that it does, and that these atrocities are not unique to the Occupy camps. People are sexually assaulted all the time -- at concerts, at festivals, at parties surrounded by friends and acquaintances. And no one would argue that this is a reason not to have concerts, or festivals, or parties; nor should they.

I am skeptical, too, about some of the outrage against the anti-police sentiments of many of the Occupy protesters. Personally, I would never condemn someone for calling or going to the police when they felt their safety was in danger, quite simply because that is how we are taught to react, and for most people, reaching for these perceived authority figures is an act of self-defence. At the same time, it must be acknowledged that the police and the courts have an extremely bad track record when it comes to dealing with rape reports -- often harassing survivors so badly that they have sometimes said that the results of making the report were almost as bad as the rape itself -- which is among the reasons so many rapes go unreported. Unless there happens to be an officer on hand to actually stop the assault from taking place, there's probably not much they're going to be able or willing to do to help you. The system of legal redress for sexual crimes is hopelessly broken (if 'broken' is even a term that can apply to a system that has been weighted against the victims from the beginning; that has never brought anything like justice or healing to survivors, delivering only petty vengeance at best, and a humiliating ordeal at worst or in addition). Given this inefficacy, and the fact that many people -- especially long-time activists, the poor, and people of colour -- have either been physically or sexually assaulted themselves by police, or have had it happen to those close to them (not to mention the police violence that has already been inflicted on several of the Occupy camps themselves), it is hardly surprising that many wish to find other ways of dealing with the problem of sexual attacks in the camp communities that they are creating, to develop their own systems of security.

What, then, is the solution? I have to admit, I don't really know. It's easy enough to name the source of the problem: patriarchy, misogyny, and (duh) the perpetrators of sexual attacks themselves. But I have no more idea of how to prevent sexual attacks in the Occupations than in any other area of life. The basic advice seems to be the same: 1) Don't sexaully harass, assault, or rape anyone (simple!); 2) If you witness a sexual attack taking place, INTERVENE -- say something, do something, call for help, call the attacker out on their behaviour, even (or especially) if it is as "subtle" as leering, making inappropriate comments, or using sexually threatening body language and the like; 3) When you see your comrades (or "passers-by" or "free lunchers" who are, like, totally unconnected with the camp, obvs) engaging in sexist language or behaviour, or voicing sexist opinions, CALL THEM OUT ON IT. This last is the more long-term solution, as obviously calling someone out on their sexist language today is probably not going to stop them raping someone tonight, but if complete non-tolerance of sexism becomes the norm, then (and only then) we will have hoisted ourselves out of the rape culture, and THAT will have a serious impact in reducing rape and other sexual assault and harassment.

Finally, it's worth pointing out that, as spaces in which people are trying to build an intentional sense of community and communitarian spirit, the Occupy camps are exceptionally good places to practice this sort of community-based rape prevention. They're certainly better suited to tackle sexual assault problems than, say, a music festival or a concert or even most larger house parties. The first step, though, is for the protesters to acknowledge the problem and tackle it head-on; if they continue to equivocate and distance themselves from those who have been sexually harassed and attacked within the camps, then they will only perpetuate the rape culture of the wider world. They will sow discontent among themselves and, ultimately, the movement will fail. There can be no class liberation without women's liberation. We can't wait until after The Revolution to tackle patriarchy. We have to do it NOW.

Day 7 – Most underrated book

Seconding awomanthatsblue's complaint about the superlatives. Jeez. Like, how do you even choose? I thought I'd be clever and try to find something on Goodreads that had a crazy low rating compared to what I gave it, but there are several of those, too. So I'm gonna take the same tack, and just go with an underrated book: The Edible Woman by Margaret Atwood.

This may seem like an odd choice, given how ultra-famous Margaret Atwood is and all, but she's mostly famous for her later stuff, like A Handmaid's Tale or The Blind Assassin. Now, the latter also happens to be among my Favourite Books Ever (will it make another appearance in the meme? I haven't thought that far ahead! Stay tuned to find out!), but The Edible Woman was Atwood's first novel, and also happened to be the first of hers that I ever read. And it floored me.

It was written in the early/mid-'60s, some years before it was actually published (1969), and Atwood describes it in her preface as 'more pre-feminist than feminist', saying that she hadn't had so much of a feminist awakening yet when writing it, and noting that the main character's options in life remain very much the same at the end of the book as at the beginning: trapped in a dull loveless job or a dull loveless marriage.

In an odd sort of way, I feel like its more-proto-feminst-than-feminist qualities are the perfect mirror for reading it now. That is, it is rich with metaphor and all the tools and ingredients for feminist analysis laid out bare, but without having any actual analysis in it, because it doesn't quite know how -- which is kind of precisely the point I feel we're at with feminism today. Sure, it's recognized, but it's also stagnated. Things have gotten a lot better than they were, but we're told that now that we can dress like men and own property like men and have jobs like men and keep our names &c. &c. that we should be satisfied and please just be quiet already, MEN are talking, I think I heard the doorbell, ooh I think the baby's poopy, yes of course I'll help you with the housework, darling, we are a team...

There's not much you can say to people who claim to agree with you and then refuse to acknowledge how their actions belie their words.

( Upcoming Days )

*So, I guess I missed a day there -- and am right under the wire for missing a second. I wasn't even sure I had until I looked at the date on the last entry to get the list for this one, because that is how hectic my yesterday was. Really nice, but hectic. Anyway, nobody said these thirty days had to be consecutive! Right? Right?

There's been some recent patter over at aberwyn's journal about cultural ideas of male and female sexuality and the differences therein, &c., where she characterised evolutionary psych as follows:

"The method is simple: find a characteristic you want to define as Male or Female. Make up a plausible story to explain it. Make sure you set your story so far in the past that it's impossible to prove or disprove it. Write a book about it! Must be real then."

So, the game! Take a characteristic typically seen as 'masculine' or 'feminine'. Now switch genders, and make up a plausible-sounding explanation for why we "evolved" such a trait. Here's some I prepared earlier:

- Female promiscuity is an evolutionary adaptation, because the male that makes the best caretaker is not necessarily the one that will provide the strongest & best genes for her offspring.*

- Men tend to have a higher linguistic and emotional intelligence than women, because while hunting in a group it's important to have tight social cohesion; whereas women tend to have a higher spatial/mathematical intelligence, which in our prehistoric past helped them remember where to gather plants.

- Men naturally prefer pink, because of the pinkening of female lips and vulvas which indicates sexual arousal and therefore availability. Women naturally prefer blue because it is calming to their histrionic temperaments.**

* I've seen this argument advanced to explain the extramarital affairs of usually-monogamous birds -- but this recent study on zebra finches indicates that it's probably just that the genes responsible for a greater tendency towards promiscuity are heritable by both sexes.

** That last bit's a joke, obvi. (I mean, all of this is a joke, but still), but OMG you guys do you remember a few years ago when some British evolutionary psychologists proposed that women "naturally" prefer pink because of gathering berries, while men "naturally" prefer blue because of hunting under an open sky? THEY ACTUALLY SAID THIS. AND IT GOT IN ALL THE PAPERS. And then a whole bunch of historians/anthropologists/people from non-Western cultures were like "Um, guys, you know that particular set of general colour preferences is very specific to your place and time, right? And it doesn't hold true around the world and it was even reversed in your own culture a hundred years ago, mmkay? Yeah? No, evidently not."

Late last night, lying in bed, I started to hear raised voices somewhere in the middle distance. I couldn't make out any words, only the emotions. They seemed innocent at first: laughing, jocular. Then the voices seemed to turn alternately taunting and hostile. This went on for some time. Then I heard a scream, and the tones of the shouting became frightened and angry. I went to the window.

I couldn't see very much, because the altercation seemed to be happening in front of a pub across the main road, and I was peering over the roof of an intervening building. People were walking back and forth, with body language either slurred and drunken or hunched and concerned. I was concerned, but clearly unneeded, so I lay back down. I heard an ambulance siren -- not an unusual sound, as many of them are routed along that road on their way to their emergencies -- and my first thought was 'please, please let it pass by'. But the siren drew near, quieted, stopped for several minutes, and then started again, speeding away.

I lay in bed, concerned, helpless. And ashamed, upon reflection, of my wish that the ambulance was not there for some nasty result of the altercation by the pub, that it would pass by in service of some other emergency, elsewhere. I found a post hoc justification almost immediately -- that whatever unknown elsewhere emergency had a good chance of being some medical problem that no one could have prevented, whereas any medical emergency resulting from this altercation at the edges of my earshot would almost certainly be the result of violence. But this is not an honest reflection of my emotional reaction. I wasn't thinking about the probability of elsewhere emergencies being medical instead of violent. I just wanted the emergency to be elsewhere: for the people in physical (and therefore emotional) proximity to me not to be the ones in danger.

Hume pointed out that our moral sentiments seem to be highly dependent on the degree of empathy we feel for their subject. This is a problem -- so much so that it is often denied -- because, of course, we don't want this to be the case. When we reason about morality, it seems that it must have some kind of universal authority, or else be totally meaningless. This is why, in meta-ethics, emotivists (who argue that "ethics" are merely the meaningless expressions of our sentiments) have been singled out for particularly vitriolic venom, my own included. And yet... it seems undeniable that, whatever role they play in our moral judgements, our emotional sympathies are key in our moral motivations.

This, of course, has massive political consequences. We protect our own and those we perceive as 'our own'. It is very difficult to get people upset about injustices happening halfway across the world. It is very hard even for me, as a person who keeps herself very aware of these problems, to avoid cynicism (or, alternatively, to avoid falling into deep despair over the horrors of the world, when I widen my empathetic scope to include it all). But even taking the very rational approach, of recognizing the horrors but also my own limitations, it is hard to figure out just what I can do to combat them. Having now awoken, I don't want to lie back down.

UK packaged food labelling has recently started to have these little "traffic light" guides on it, where foods will be categorized as 'green', 'amber', or 'red' based on healthiness. Sometimes these are subdivided into different categories -- as on my box of cereal, which says it is 'green' for fat content but 'red' for sugar content (heh).

...And then it says it is 'green' for 'calories'. What?? Since when is 'energy contained in this food' something that is healthy or not? I mean, I had understood the colour-labelling of the other categories (fat, sugar, fibre, etc.) to be proportional measures -- i.e. this is a sugary food because it has a lot of sugar per serving. But calories -- I would have thought -- are the base agaisnt which some of the others might be measured. Right? Or maybe it means 'calories per volume', where cereal has very few and something like cake or meat has quite a lot.

In any case, foods with a lot of calories per volume are not (necessarily) any less healthy than foods with a low calorie::volume count. And it makes me angry. Angry and ranty.

Because, you see, I spent a long time in my overweight early-teens "counting calories" as a weight-loss strategy. It didn't work. It just made me hyper-aware of my food, and even though I lost a little weight, it didn't make any long-term difference, and my diet ended up being a lot less healthy than it might have been otherwise, because I would do things like forego the meatier parts of my meals in order to "spend" my allotted calories on ice cream later.

Worse, it set up in my mind this idea of 'calories (=food energy!) = BAD!' Or, okay, I probably got the idea to count calories in the first place because that idea had already been culturally implanted. My mom and aunt were in Weight Watcher's at the time, and the idea of calories and the counting of them seemed to be ever-present in the pages of women's magazines -- which still managed to worm their way into my head, even though I never properly read them; but they were always there in doctors' and dentists' and other waiting rooms (and indeed in the lobby of the Weight Watcher's, whenever my mom had to bring me along and leave me waiting during her dietary group-therapy).

Nowadays I have an utterly different perspective. I eat to fill my belly, and there is no chance that I would consider 'calories' (=food energy!) to be any kind of inherently bad thing. If anything, they are an inherently good thing! I still struggle to maintain a healthy diet, even though I have long since dropped out of the 'overweight' category. But now that means "a diet that will give me enough energy and vitamins to go about my life" rather than "a diet that will make me thin". There was a time this winter when I was buying these little pre-mixed chocolate milk things instead of lunch (like I said, I struggle) because they were cheaper than food and required no prep, while having just as many calories as a meal, and filling me up as much. And I would often go for the higher-calorie "chocolate brownie" flavour above the plain chocolate flavour, purely because the former had more calories for the same price. Which is, like, utterly unhealthy -- but only because I was drinking them to replace a meal, not because 'calories' are somehow 'bad for you'.

I am female. This means that for as long as I can remember, people have inquired about my intention to procreate. I recall being asked at the age of about four how many children I intended to have, and being encouraged to seriously contemplate the question. And I did, too, as did my sister.

My brother did not. It didn't matter. I mean, obviously if a male child discussed the issue, it was seriously discussed with him (my cousin Alex used to say he wanted 12 kids), but the matter never seemed to be pressed on them if they didn't bring it up.

As I got older, the messages started to change, for a while. The topic of procreation became more about how it worked and how to prevent it, and for a while it seemed that we females were on somewhat equal footing with the males; our bodies were different, but it was impressed upon us that we had equal responsibility for preventing unplanned pregnancy (a stance that older feminists inform me is a recent one).

... But a few years later, as the conversation turns towards the question of having kids rather than preventing them, all the weight is shifted back onto the women. Women are encouraged, at every stage of their fertile years, to think about their potential to have children, and the consequences thereof. In particular, we are asked to consider how to "balance" this with our desire for a "career". Countless articles are written about it, ranging from go-getter encouraging to pessimistic and downright demeaning. And, of course, we talk about it with each other.

A (nominally feminist) message board I frequent, which is about 98% female, and mostly teens and 20-somethings, discusses the issue with some regularity. It's not like we talk about nothing else (like, to another woman, about something other than a man), but childbearing comes up a lot. A recent thread included the serious suggestion -- discussed at some length! -- that women should start thinking seriously about this around age 16 or 18, when they are deciding on what life-paths to take, career-wise, because some professions are much more compatible with child-rearing. Within the safe space of our discussions, this is a valid and potentially helpful point to make. But a part of me still wants to shout "COME ON, MY SISTREN! Do whatever you want with your uterus! Have your kids then let's fight like hell to make sure you have the opportunity to continue your career if you want to! To make sure that your partner is equally able (and feels equally obliged) to bear half the burden of caring for them! To achieve a gender-equal society!"

Because, honestly, while a small part of it all makes sense, biologically speaking -- women are the only ones who are physically obliged to take at least some time off work to accommodate the actual birth of the child -- there's no reason why all of the intellectual labour of pondering these questions should be done by the ones who incubate the foetuses. When was the last time you heard a group of young men discussing the relative merits of different career choices based on their potential to accommodate any hypothetical future children? Where are all the op-eds telling young men how to plan their lives around their reproductive capacities? A google search for 'men career children' first asks if I meant 'women career children' (and gives the top two results for that), then shows a whole bunch of pages about how the career-vs.-children issue is an issue for women and not for men. Big news there. I mean, I know writing this isn't going to tell anyone anything new, either; but I'm not informing, I'm just ranting.

By way of further research, I asked a male housemate if anyone had ever asked him to consider the potential effect of children on his career. It was a small sample size, I know, but the research was purely rhetorical; of course no one had. To be fair, he said, 'career' itself was not much of a consideration for him, either -- which is about the answer you'd expect from an anarchist. However, it gets to what I think is the real root of the problem: that we, not as women but as people, at least in the time and place these words inhabit, are encouraged to think of "careers" as the be-all end-all of identity. Not just what we do but who we are. If "careers" were not hierarchical, and if "advancement" didn't matter so much, then it wouldn't matter so much if someone -- male or female -- decided to take one or three or fifteen years off to raise their families, and return to them later. Obviously in something like research there'd be some catch-up work to do, but in most cases it would simply mean that you ended your 'working life' with a few years' less experience than your peers. Is that such a bad thing?

Unfortunately, I think that kind of paradigm shift is going to be a lot harder to achieve than simple in-system (but still necessary!) steps like paid paternity leave.

There's this old parable I heard once. I don't know how old, actually (and it might have come from one of those Chicken Soup for the Soul books my mother used to be so fond of), but it goes like this:

A storm out at sea has washed thousands of starfish onto a beach*, and a man is walking along the beach, picking them up one by one, and flinging them back into the sea.

"What are you doing?" asks an incredulous passer-by, "You'll never save them all! There are thousands of starfish on the beach, and you're only one man; you'll save maybe a hundred, tops. You can't possibly make a difference!"

The man doesn't stop, doesn't even look up. He just picks up another starfish and tosses it into the sea. "I sure made a difference to that one," he says. Boo-yah!

But ... what if storms like that are totally uncharacteristic for the area, but are becoming more frequent (and thus likely to kill many, many more starfish) due to global warming, which is contributed to, in part, by, say, offshore oil wells near these folk's seaside town? And all of this is allowed (and even encouraged) by their government? Wouldn't it be more productive for citizens to spend their time lobbying their government and campaigning against the oil drilling, rather than throwing starfish into the sea? Or at least for that man to say "Hey, I'm gonna handle these starfish right here, why don't you go fight the oil companies?"

Okay, maybe not in this particular instance. A storm is, after all, a one-off event, and the man only has a limited time to throw the beached starfish into the sea, after which he can go campaign and lobby and whatnot. In an acute crisis, charity is crucial and probably a moral duty. But what if the crisis is protracted? What if it's not a one-off natural disaster, but a protracted famine caused by economic instability? What if there's a much more direct cause or set of causes to follow and fight? Then where does one best direct one's energies?

What if, for instance, the UN World Food Programme buys food for impoverished people in poor nations, while, due to a right-wing consensus among economic superpowers, the IMF and the World Bank "strongly discourage" those nations from setting price caps on anything, including vital staples like rice, as prices have more than doubled in the last two years? The left hand giveth, and the right hand driveth more people into poverty.

I've been meaning to make a post along these lines for over a year and a half now, ever since someone linked me to www.freerice.com, a "vocabulary-game" website that donates 10 grains of rice for every correct answer you provide on their game. It's basically like a less-fun, solitary version of The Dictionary Game, except that the "synonyms" they provide are often not technically synonymous, being either examples within a category or in some cases only loosely related words. This led to exasperated ranting on my part (e.g. 'Lynx' does not equal 'wild cat'! A lynx is a type of wild cat!)

Pedantry aside, though, a lot about the website just bothered me, in the same way that similar sites where you click on things to donate things all bother me. I think it's the self-congratulatory ethos around them. I dunno. I mean, I guess it's always a 'good thing' to donate money to any particular charity; that the work that any particular charity does is always good, in particular for the people they help -- in the same way that it's good for those hundred or so starfish that get thrown back into the sea. But the implication of these websites seems to be that, by generating donations by clicking on things, you are somehow solving the problems they are set up to address.

And that's just... not true. No more than music can save the world, throwing money at problems without implementing structural changes seldom solves them. Granted, the UN WFP's website indicates that they do do some campaigning, but as the limp left hand of Worldwide coordination, they are doomed to be forever thwarted by the dextrous IMF and World Bank.

I... I thought after a year of mulling I would have a better way to finish this -- that I would have come to some sort of succinct, easily-verbalised conclusion. But I don't think that's going to happen. Instead, I'll leave you with someone else's frustrated wisdom:

"When I feed the poor, they call me a saint. When I ask why the poor have no food , they call me a communist."
-- Dom Hélder Câmara


*Incidentally, the picture of the crab there was taken after just such a storm -- West Sands was covered in various clams, debris, and little thin-armed starfish, among other creatures. Though, by the time I went down to explore, most of them were long-dead, and the rest were soon to be eaten by seagulls.