Author Archives: Hector Vila

Medicine and Sustainability

Two important stories that will make sense to all of you, but specifically to those “I wanna be a doctor” folks among us. As you’ll learn in the California story, doctors get paid by the task — office visit, exam, surgery, etc. This is not sustainable given where health care may be headed; it’s certainly not beneficial to the consumer. Also as you’ll hear, given the cost of medical school and the loans MD’s have to pay back after graduation, specialization in the system drives doctors away from where they are indeed needed — primary care.

In California, Facing Down a Family Physician Shortage

In another story that shows us how wonderful we are, this is concerns Global Health. In fact, this link will take you to several stories concerning Global Health — cholera perhaps spreading to the DR and Miami, organ trafficking, and a global food crisis.

As you ponder your last “mini” essays, think about some of these challenges.

The Harry Potter Alliance

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This, according to the famous Henry Jenkins, media scholar at MIT, could be the way the next wave of activists gets nurtured. Jenkins calls this “Avatar Activism.”

About 100,000 Harry Potter fans have been mobilized by HPA for causes including marriage equality, genocide prevention and literacy. They raised enough money to send five cargo planes to Haiti bearing medical supplies after the earthquake there, and they’ve bought thousands of books for libraries in Rwanda and the Mississippi Delta.

Harry Potter: Boy Wizard … And Real Life Activist? addresses what may be an evolving phenomenon around activism. Reading this, I am reminded of Plato’s Republic and how he warned that the poet is a threat to the State. I’m wondering whether this new form of narrating could be a place for storytelling for a new generation?

Who Will Stand Up to the Superrich?

Frank Rich wrote an interesting article, today, in The New York Times, Who Will Stand Up to the Superrich?

Rich tells us that Americans don’t hate the rich; in some cases even admire the rich. The wealthy who lost elections, he goes on, also provided jobs for people. Rich, though, tells us that we should worry about another kind of rich American, the unseen:

The wealthy Americans we should worry about instead are the ones who implicitly won the election — those who take far more from America than they give back. They were not on the ballot, and most of them are not household names. Unlike Whitman and the other defeated self-financing candidates, they are all but certain to cash in on the Nov. 2 results. There’s no one in Washington in either party with the fortitude to try to stop them from grabbing anything that’s not nailed down.

This is serious because a democracy requires an informed citizenry; however, if this citizenry can’t see, we therefore aren’t ever sure where ideas and their motivations come from, thus trust suffers a serious blow.

As Rich suggests, “The bigger issue is whether the country can afford the systemic damage being done by the ever-growing income inequality between the wealthiest Americans and everyone else, whether poor, middle class or even rich.” Are we prepared to live in a country where the evidence — physical and otherwise — will uncover an abyss between the superrich and rich and the working class, and by working class I mean, as is evident in Rich’s column, people earning less than $200,000 and below? (Believe me, this isn’t a lot of money)

What happens in this world, this “new normal,” as we like to say, is that we lose our narrative, we can’t trust it; we also begin to sense that perhaps it’s never exited. Rich says, “That burden is inflicted not just on the debt but on the very idea of America — our Horatio Alger faith in social mobility over plutocracy, our belief that our brand of can-do capitalism brings about innovation and growth, and our fundamental sense of fairness. Incredibly, the top 1 percent of Americans now have tax rates a third lower than the same top percentile had in 1970.” The entire American concept is Romantic — it’s a romantic story that grows out of Enlightenment thinking. The trick, actually, is to reach for the Romantic sense of authenticity that shuns aristocratic values for real experience but never quite really getting there; this keeps us going or moving towards a vision of what’s real, what’s truthful. In my mind, this is what Rich is pointing to — the erosion of this Romance with the real, the lived experience, the authentic self and the journey towards that self.

I read Rich’s editorial as an explanation of the law of unintended consequences — that is, as the rich, those unseen ones especially, continue to garner more of our resources to sustain their lives, we, the workers of America, begin to realize that we’re in fact working to sustain that small percentage of citizens that reap the rewards of our labors. Thus, a percentage, an increasingly larger percentage of our value — our worth — is determined, according to Rich, by people we don’t know and people who are pulling at strings we don’t see.

How do we work through this? What do we have to do to better understand our roles in the world of labor (yet to come for you)? How does Rich make you feel? What is the relationship between Rich’s editorial and McKibben’s Eaarth?

The Corrosion of America

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Bob Herbert writes, in The Corrosion of America, that, “Aging and corroded pipes are bursting somewhere every couple of minutes. Dilapidated sewer systems are contaminating waterways and drinking water. Many local systems are so old and inadequate — in some cases, so utterly rotten — that they are overwhelmed by heavy rain.”

This is creating a very dangerous situation throughout the US. And if you look at this “corrosion” and couple it to Fred’s post, below, about poverty, then

If this were a first-class society we would rebuild our water systems to the point where they would be the envy of the world, and that would bolster the economy in the bargain. But that would take maturity and vision and effort and sacrifice, all of which are in dismayingly short supply right now.

We can’t even build a railroad tunnel beneath the Hudson River from New Jersey to New York.

Improving water systems — and infrastructure generally, if properly done — would go a long way toward improving the nation’s dismal economic outlook. According to the U.S. Conference of Mayors, every dollar invested in water and sewer improvements has the potential to increase the long-term gross domestic product by more than six dollars. Hundreds of thousands of jobs would be created if the nation were serious about repairing and upgrading water mains, crumbling pipes, water treatment plants, dams, levees and so on.

Millions of jobs would be created if we could bring ourselves to stop fighting mindless wars and use some of those squandered billions to bring the nation’s infrastructure in the broadest sense up to 21st-century standards.

In Denial of Climate Change

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In this editorial, In Denial of Climate Change, we learn about a perspective that’s being taken by some Republican candidates.

The candidates are not simply rejecting solutions, like putting a price on carbon, though these, too, are demonized. They are re-running the strategy of denial perfected by Mr. Cheney a decade ago, repudiating years of peer-reviewed findings about global warming and creating an alternative reality in which climate change is a hoax or conspiracy.

This is a perspective that’s not uncommon among many people across the USA. I wonder, then, what we have to do to demonstrate that we, indeed, have affected — and continue to affect — Nature?

These elections (November) and this mediated hype without debate comes at a time when we’re witnessing the questioning the “value,” “worth” and significance of the Humanities in colleges and universities. For instance, there is a debate, ongoing, in Do Colleges Need French Departments.

In her response, Martha Naussbum argues that,

Cuts in the humanities are bad for business and bad for democracy. Even if a nation’s only goal were economic prosperity, the humanities supply essential ingredients for a healthy business culture.

Nations such as China and Singapore, which previously ignored the humanities, are now aggressively promoting them, because they have concluded that the cultivation of the imagination through the study of literature, film, and the other arts is essential to fostering creativity and innovation. They also have found that teaching critical thinking and argumentation (a skill associated with courses in philosophy) is essential in order to foster healthy debate inside a business world that might too easily become complacent or corrupt.

We in the U.S. are moving away from the humanities just at the time that our rivals are discovering their worth. But a healthy business culture is not all that life in America is about.

What might be the connections between Republican rejection of man-made climate change, the media hype without debate or dialog, and the willingness of citizens to accept the notion that climate change is happening — and has happened — outside our influence?

What Democracy?

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Following our discussion on Thursday, defining terms — Democracy, Socialism, Communism, Capitalism and The Yankees — several parallel stories have appeared that suggest the struggle and the tension we discovered in our exercise, in our discussion.

Please examine these, carefully, and again per group (each group, except one, still is behind and has to do the Scott Page post), determine HOW these stories define Democracy/Capitalims/Us and HOW these stories parallel Empire of Illusion.

The first story is from Terry Gross’s Fresh Air, ” ‘Citizens United’ Ruling Opened Floodgates on Groups’ Ad Spending.”

The next 2 are not stories, but rather, commentaries. First, Bob Herbert, writing for the New York Times, in Policy at its Worst, tells us that, “We can’t put the population to work, or get the kids through college, or raise the living standards of the middle class and the poor. We can’t rebuild the infrastructure or curb our destructive overreliance on fossil fuels.”

The next opinion, also from the Times, is by Charles M. Blow, High Cost of Crime. Here, Blow informs us that, “Our approach to this crime problem for more than two decades has been the mass incarceration of millions of Americans and the industrializing of our criminal justice system. Over the last 25 years, the prison population has quadrupled. This is a race to the bottom and a waste of human capital. A prosperous country cannot remain so by following this path.” Take a look at how much a single murder costs — then ask yourself: why do we incarcerate more people than anyone else in the industrial world?

The last story, which parallels Hedges’ chapter, “The Illusion of Wisdom,” and written by the indefatigable Camille Paglia, was sent to me by Izzy Ocampo. In “Revalorizing the Trades,” Paglia asks, “what if a student wants a different, less remunerative or status-oriented but more personally fulfilling career?” She responds to her question, saying that, “There is little flexibility in American higher education to allow for alternative career tracks.”

In a moment, Paglia sounds a lot like Hedges:

Jobs, and the preparation of students for them, should be front and center in the thinking of educators. The idea that college is a contemplative realm of humanistic inquiry, removed from vulgar material needs, is nonsense. The humanities have been gutted by four decades of pretentious postmodernist theory and insular identity politics. They bear little relationship to the liberal arts of broad perspective and profound erudition that I was lucky enough to experience in college in the 1960s.

Examine each of the stories and the editorials, then discuss, online, how all this fits our notion of the struggle for democracy, our struggle for the truth?

Some (perhaps) Depressing Updates

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Panel Blasts Government On Gulf Oil Spill Response

October 7, 2010
A preliminary report released Wednesday by the federal commission investigating the BP oil spill blames the Obama administration for misrepresenting “the amount and fate of the oil” in the Gulf of Mexico.

Scientists and Soldiers Solve a Bee Mystery

October 6, 2010
Since 2006, 20 to 40 percent of the bee colonies in the United States alone have suffered “colony collapse.” Suspected culprits ranged from pesticides to genetically modified food.

Obama talks green, GOP talks freeze

October 2, 2010
Wind, solar and other clean energy technologies produce jobs and are essential for the country’s environment and economy, President Barack Obama said in promoting his administration’s efforts.

The president used his weekly radio and Internet address Saturday, a month away from congressional elections, to charge Republicans with wanting to scrap incentives for such projects.

Scott Page on Leveraging Diversity

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As you find definitions for Democracy, Socialism, Capitalism and Communism, you will undoubtedly confront the notion of diversity — what is it, why is it important, how do ensure diversity since it’s apparently important for human evolution.

In all, as you define the above terms, you will be examining the characteristics of our society, particularly as we discuss Ecological Democracy. Diversity shows up here, again.

Scott E. Page, who came to Midd last year, wrote The Difference: How the Power of Diversity Creates Better Groups, Firms, Schools, and Societies. (Read some of the book here)

I suggest that you find the time, either alone or in groups, to check out Scott’s lecture at the University of Virginia and follow his logic. Regardless of what endeavor you choose in the future, thinking about how diversity works — and can work — will be extraordinarily useful. Of course, thinking about how we might be able to enable diversity to evolve in a healthy manner with Democracy — or whatever else we come up with as we contemplate our world — is extraordinarily important.

The Lecture: Leveraging Diversity

After watching the lecture, if, by group say, each group synthesizes and summarizes what you hear and then point to what you find important will be very useful; then if each person of each group adds and comments on what others are summarizing and saying, this will be useful too — and perhaps a model of what Page is talking about.

A Conversation with Noam Chomsky

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It’s rare that Noam Chomsky is asked to appear on mainstream media. That fact that he’s not asked to appear should say plenty about our media establishment, particularly about the owners.

In a rare moment, Chomsky gave an interview, Tuesday, on On Point Radio, NPR, with Tom Ashbrook.

Listen here. He’s speaking on U.S. rage and ruin.

The End of Nature, FEMA Trailers, and Bed Bugs