Thoughts About Color

Last week at my local pharmacy, I spotted something I hadn’t seen before. A box of Crayolas labeled “Colors of the World,” with 24 crayons representing different skin tones.

An Internet search tells me this set hit the market about three years ago. (I’m not a parent or a teacher. I don’t always keep up.) Colors of the World is an expansion on the set of eight “Multicultural” Crayolas released in 1992. Which was itself an improvement on the days when there was just one skin-toned Crayola labeled FLESH.

Yeah, I’m old enough to remember that. A crayon that came real close to matching my Anglo-American skin. One I could use to color arms, legs and faces of the people in my pictures.

We hear a lot about systemic racism and unconscious bias. I see that FLESH Crayola as a classic example. I really don’t think the folks at Crayola were looking for ways to make black, brown and other-colored kids feel left out. I think they just didn’t see those kids. Crayola sold its first box of colors in 1903. For the first half-century or so, the company was no doubt dominated by white people. I’ll bet they were mostly decent people, dreaming up art supplies to brighten children’s lives. When they imagined little hands holding those crayons, they saw the pale hands of their own kids.

Before I tell the rest of this story, I should explain that I learned to read at an early age, well before I was old enough to go to school. I impressed Mom and Dad by reading street signs, Little Golden Books, the backs of cereal boxes. I read the labels on my Crayola wrappers. (BLUE VIOLET looked a lot like VIOLET BLUE until you got it on the page.) So I have a distinct memory of the day I reached for a FLESH Crayola and found it inexplicably labeled PEACH.

Hmmm, I thought. Must’ve grabbed the wrong crayon. I sifted through the set. FLESH was nowhere to be found, but this PEACH sure did look like the same color. As a devotee of the printed word, I was puzzled. FLESH and PEACH each had five letters; both ended in “H”. Had I just been imagining FLESH all along?

I hadn’t, of course. An article in Huffpost tells how a social researcher wrote to Crayola in 1962. The letter pointed out what should have been obvious: humans come in different shades, and some kids in their social experiments picked on other kids who weren’t colored “FLESH.” Not long after, the company changed that label from FLESH to PEACH.

I would have been six, going on seven, in 1962. I may have been older when I noticed the change; it’s not as if I got a new box of Crayolas every year. At that age, I knew perfectly well that people came in different colors. Still, it hadn’t seemed strange to me that the FLESH Crayola just happened to match my skin. Systemic racism. It’s all around us.

Change happens, but can be awfully slow. Thirty years elapsed between the renaming of FLESH and release of the Multicultural Crayolas. More than two decades later, we get Colors of the World. Those who follow such trends mostly see it as a positive change, but Crayola’s CEO took some heat for what he said in the 2020 news release:

“With the world growing more diverse than ever before, Crayola hopes our new
Colors of the World crayons will increase representation…”

“We have always been here,” groused one Twitter pundit. “It says a lot that the CEO of Crayola has only just now started to see us.”

Change comes slowly, and sometimes it seems to run backward. Looking over what I’ve just written, I’m thinking maybe I should have kept my thoughts to myself. What if some red-state politician reads this, decides Crayolas are too “woke,” and bans their use in public schools?

Mammogram

Here I am at The Breast Center at St. David’s, waiting for my annual mammogram.

I’ve been coming here for several years. In some ways, it’s nicer than the general imaging center where I used to get my exams. Instead of those awkward hospital gowns, we get real bathrobes with tie belts and pockets. We wait in a Women’s Lounge furnished with comfortable chairs. A round-faced woman with a brown ponytail is here ahead of me, sitting quietly. We nod, but don’t speak.

There are two changing rooms. I enter one and exchange my shirt and bra for a robe. Deposit personal belongings in locker #10 as assigned. Last time I was here, they gave me a wristband with a key. Now the locks are electronic; I have to punch a code on a keypad. It takes two tries to get the locker open.

This lounge used to have free tea and coffee, along with magazines to take a patient’s mind off the impending procedure. All that went away with COVID-19. There’s a TV mounted high on one wall, but it isn’t on today.

There are worse places to sit and wait. But I don’t like being here. I don’t suppose anyone does.

A technician comes for the round-faced woman. Other patients come and go, changing into robes or back into street clothes. A stocky woman with short gray hair. A tall, lanky gal in runner’s sandals. A classy blonde wearing a watch and multiple bracelets. We come in different sizes and shapes, but we’re all here for the same reason.

When my turn comes, they’ll take me to an examining room and ask me to slip off one sleeve of my robe. The technician will introduce herself so that she won’t be a complete stranger when she grabs my tit with both hands and positions it on the imaging plate. She’ll manipulate my shoulder and armpit, putting them where they won’t block the view, and then lower the compression plate until my breast is smashed between two hard surfaces. We’ll set up for two sets of pictures – one horizontal, one vertical – then repeat the whole process on the other side.

None of this is exactly fun, but it isn’t the main reason I hate this exam. The real reason is this: Every time I walk into this building, I face the possibility of having my life turned upside down.

It happens. On several occasions in the past 25 years, I’ve been called back for additional imaging. Twice, I’ve been sent for biopsies. I have a titanium clip to mark the spot where a suspicious calcium deposit was excised in 2008; an inch-long scar where a benign lump was removed several years before that.

None of those glitches turned out to be anything life-threatening. I’m lucky; I know it, and I have no right to whine. Who wouldn’t prefer a false alarm to a confirmed case of cancer?

Still, a false alarm doesn’t make for a happy day. When you get the call that says, “We need to take a closer look” … when they send you to a different waiting room because the radiologist wants to talk to you … when you’re at home biting your nails and awaiting biopsy results, you don’t yet know it’s a false alarm. And I always imagine the worst.

So I’m here today at the Breast Center, wishing all this would just go away. I remind myself that there’s no history of breast cancer in my family, that my last four mammograms came back normal. That even the ones that weren’t quite normal turned out to be nothing serious in the end.

Thoughts like this can help settle my nerves, but they aren’t helping now.

Let’s face it: if I knew for sure there was nothing to worry about, I wouldn’t be here, would I?

The Melendy Quartet - by Elizabeth Enright

My Favorite Childhood Reads

With memories of this fictional family dancing in my mind, I Google “Melendy” and see that this series of books is still out there. In multiple printings, plus an audio version that parents can play in the car on long road trips with their kids.

I’m pleased to know that. I was maybe in third grade when I found The Saturdays at my town library. The kids in the Melendy family (Mona, Rush, Randy and Oliver) get bored at home on weekends, so they form a kind of mutual association. Each Saturday, they’ll pool their allowances and give the money to one sibling to spend as s/he chooses. In the 1940s, when these books were written, a couple of bucks would have been enough to get somewhere – especially if you lived in a big city with public transportation, as the Melendys did. The chapters of the book describe their individual adventures. When six-year-old Oliver’s turn comes, nobody really expects him to board a bus and head off by himself -- but he does, with interesting results.

In the next book, the family moves to the country. They live with their father, who's a fairly cool guy, and a housekeeper/nanny named Cuffy, in a house that’s old and peculiar enough to harbor interesting secrets (The Four-Story Mistake.) One of the kids gets to know a teenager named Mark, who appears to be alone in the world. The family eventually adopts him (Then There Were Five). The older kids grow up and get on with their lives. In the last book, Spiderweb for Two, Randy and Oliver are the only ones left at home.

In some ways, this series reminds me of the Narnia Chronicles. Two brothers, two sisters, and a string of adventures that progresses over time. But the Melendys’ lives happen in the everyday world. Sure, it was a world different from mine. My small Texas town didn’t have city buses, subways or art museums. We didn’t have the seasonal changes that the characters experienced in their country home (it was here, I think, that I first heard of “Indian summer.”) But the house, the woods that surrounded it, and the characters that graced the pages were vividly drawn. I felt like I knew this family. I was always thrilled to find the next volume at the library, to know the story wasn't over yet.

The Wind Call - by Rosalie K. Fry

My Favorite Childhood Reads

This book, with its worn hardback cover, has been with me perhaps longer than any other. Mom and Dad would read me chapters at bedtime before I learned to read on my own. The author shares our family name. I’ve often wondered if that’s why my parents (or grandparents?) bought the book.

It’s the story of a tiny boy, a child of the Little People, who arrives unexpectedly in an English garden. An assortment of birds is checking out a strange new plant, something the gardener brought home from a recent holiday in the tropics, when they find the dark-eyed infant sleeping in a flower. The kid is obviously far from home with no one to take care of him. So a pair of songbirds takes him to their nest in a hawthorn tree, and he grows up with three newly hatched chicks.

The “wind call” in the title is that subtle change in the air that marks the approach of fall, telling migratory birds that it’s time to fly south. Father Blackcap sings the little ones to sleep every night with a song about the great flight and their sunny winter home by the Mediterranean Sea.

When his adopted brothers are ready for their first flying lesson, the boy, Pierello, is old enough to climb out of the nest and make his way to the ground. He spends an idyllic summer learning to fend for himself in the woods: picking wild berries, sliding down little waterfalls in the burbling stream, consorting with glow-worms, butterflies, dormice, and all types of birds. There are line drawings of Pierello and his friends, and a half-dozen color pictures printed on special paper. Behind all these happy adventures looms the novel’s Big Question: will this wingless child find a way to go south with his family when the Wind Call comes?

---

Looking back, I wonder if my love of nature began with this fairy tale. Many of its creatures were (and still are) unfamiliar to a kid growing up in Texas, but I’ve always suspected the portrayals were accurate. Today, thanks to the Internet, it’s not hard to check. I did some surfing and found that yes, male and female blackcaps do share chick-rearing duties. Nightjars really do fly silently and lay their camouflaged eggs on bare ground.

And what about the author and illustrator, Rosalie K. Fry? I didn't think I'd ever heard of her, aside from this book. But it turns out she wrote several others, and one became the basis for the indie film The Secret of Roan Inish. Wow. Who knew?

The Zany World of Dr. Seuss

My Favorite Childhood Reads

Dr. Seuss has his own Facebook wall. The Grinch is all over it, urging visitors to “grow your heart 3 sizes” by doing a good deed each day from now until Christmas.

I read some odd books as a kid. In some ways, Dr. Seuss’s books are among the oddest – but they’re also some of the best known and universally loved. Who doesn’t instantly recognize the Cat in the Hat’s red-striped stovepipe? Who couldn’t, on command, recite a few lines of Green Eggs and Ham?

I think The Cat in the Hat was the first Seuss book I read. I loved it. It was so much better than those dull Dick-and-Jane readers we used in primary school. I was even more fascinated when the Cat came back, left a nasty ring in his unwilling hosts’ bathtub, and wound up staining the whole hillside a garish pink.

Having gotten acquainted with the distinctive look of Dr. Seuss characters, I started to seek them out whenever I went to the library. I met Horton the elephant, Sam-I-Am, Bartholomew Cubbins of the 500 hats, the pointlessly prejudiced Sneetches, the parade of wildly fanciful creatures that marched across the pages of If I Ran the Zoo and If I Ran the Circus (two of my favorites.) And of course the immortal Grinch, who tried to eliminate Christmas and wound up saving himself.

I am clearly not the only kid who never forgot these stories. Just last night I went Christmas caroling with a group of friends. We came upon a front-yard display with life-size cutouts of the Grinch, his dog Max and a whole village of Whos. No kids in sight, just a middle-aged man who came out to listen. We sang him all six verses of “You’re a Mean One, Mr. Grinch” from the movie version of How the Grinch Stole Christmas.

As a writer, I have other reasons to admire Dr. Seuss. His galloping verses, so easy to read, couldn’t have been easy to write. But he kept turning them out, decade upon decade, still publishing new works long after I grew up. The Seuss Enterprises website says there are 44 books under the name of Dr. Seuss, plus 22 more that he wrote under other pen names. Okay, none of them is a tome like War and Peace, but still. Each one tells a story, or presents a new idea, or makes a point. And of course he did his own illustrations, too.

Here’s a bit that’s often mentioned in writers’ workshops, when they’re coaching us on the kind of determination it may take to break into the publishing market: Dr. Seuss’s first kiddie book, And to Think That I Saw It on Mulberry Street, was turned down by at least twenty publishers. They didn’t know what to do with it. They couldn’t see where it fit. What if he’d given up after the tenth rejection letter? Or the 12^th, or the 15^th? This story lives in my memory bank and pops up whenever I need reminding: if I really have something to say, don’t let the naysayers hush me up.

Theodor Seuss Geisel had plenty to say, and he’s still saying it. Go to the kids’ section of your library, your favorite bookstore, and you’ll see. Pull up one of the movies based on his books (they're still making new ones!) Or go check out some holiday decorations.

Tent Under the Spider Tree - by Gene Inyart

My Favorite Childhood Reads

Around ten years ago, when some people I work with got involved in the Children & Nature Network, I started thinking of this novel that I read and loved in elementary school. A book about three girls who spent a summer camping out alone. They slept in a tent, explored field and stream, and faced an invading horde of daddy longlegs (hence the title).

Having just read Richard Louv’s Last Child in the Woods, I found myself wondering if I’d made the whole thing up. Three pre-adolescents in a tent by themselves? That book was in my grade-school library. Would it even be allowed today?

Curiosity aroused, I got online and tracked down a copy of Tent Under the Spider Tree. It really is as good as I remembered. Short chapters written for kids, characters with distinct personalities, plenty of action.

My recollection was a little fuzzy. The girls camped out for a week, not a whole season. They weren’t entirely unsupervised: there was a farmhouse nearby, and a daily check-in with the family that lived there. But still. The girls slept every night in their tent by a stream. They couldn’t see the house from their camp. They prepared their own meals and survived mosquitoes, gnats and leeches. They had disagreements, but worked things out without adult intervention. At week’s end, they knew they’d had an experience they would never forget.

What a contrast with the kids described in Richard Louv’s book, who have lost touch with the natural world. The Children & Nature movement, working to reverse this trend, is finding out we also need to pry Mom and Dad away from their desks and computers and cars, because parents don’t let kids run free any more. Even if they want to, society tends not to let them. Two years ago, a single mom was arrested for letting her 9-year-old play at a park while she was at work. In the daytime, with a cell phone. And that wasn’t an isolated case.

The girls in Spider Tree didn’t have cell phones. That book was published in 1959. I found it in the early ‘60s. To my fourth-grade self, it read like a marvelous adventure, but not especially far-fetched. Today, it seems like a fairy tale: nearly as fantastic as the Harry Potter series. As dated, in its way, as those Betsy-Tacy stories that took place over a century ago.

The Betsy Books - by Maud Hart Lovelace

My Favorite Childhood Reads

There were a bunch of these books, and I think I read them all. Betsy-Tacy was first in the series, set, as I recall, in the very early 1900s. Two little girls met and became Best Friends. In a subsequent book they bonded with another girl called “Tib” (short for Thelma), and became a threesome. The girls grew up together, went to school, moved on to high school. Readers got to know their families: Betsy had a big sister, Julia; and I think Tacy had several siblings. As time went on, Betsy left home, spent time abroad, and got married.

It’s been many years since I read these books. I don’t recall any intricate plots; it was more slice-of-life stuff, how it was to be a girl growing up in that time. Just a few incidents stick in my mind. Some members of Tacy’s family caught scarlet fever or some other contagious disease, and the whole household went under quarantine. Years later, Betsy was living in a German boarding house, doing personal hygiene with a basin and washrag. She found out there was a real bathtub in the building, reserved for the use of army officers, and talked a couple of housemaids into smuggling her in for a real bath.

---

More information about Betsy, Tacy and friends

My Favorite Childhood Reads

A funny thing has been happening in my mind these past few months. I’ll be going about my daily routine and suddenly find myself thinking of a book I read when I was a kid. I’ll recall scenes, characters, and whole sequences of events. Sometimes it’s a book I haven’t thought about in decades. Sometimes it’s a more familiar story, one of those I always suspected I would never forget. (I should mention here that I have vintage copies of several childhood favorites. They live on the top shelf of a bookcase in my writing room.)

Perhaps, at age 60, I’m starting to enter a second childhood. Maybe some part of my psyche figures it’s time to climb into the attic of my mind and sort through the piles of stuff that are lying around in there.

When something interesting turns up in the attic, it’s fun to share with friends. In the coming weeks, I’ll post mini-reviews of my favorite childhood reads. Some are classics that anyone would recognize. Others may be obscure, and I’ll be interested to find out if any of my friends also read them. Feel free to comment and share!

Romney: Obama's Gift-Giving Beat Me

Mitt Romney isn’t running for president any longer, but he’s still our there saying odd things. My local paper this morning contains several snarky letters-to-the-editor about that conference call last week, where he said President Obama won a second term by giving “gifts” to special interest groups. Even Newt Gingrich and Bobby Jindal are on his case!

It feels weird to be on the same side with those guys (especially Newt), but I must also take exception to what Romney said. Of course, I wasn’t in on the call, so I didn’t actually hear him say it. But I’m told it went something like this:

"With regards to the young people, for instance, a forgiveness of college loan interest was a big gift. Free contraceptives were very big with young, college-aged women. And then, finally, Obamacare also made a difference for them, because as you know, anybody now 26 years of age and younger was now going to be part of their parents' plan, and that was a big gift to young people.”

The college loan interest isn’t one of my issues, but health care is. So I’ll start with those free contraceptives.

You may be right, Mitt. Getting pills and diaphragms without a copay might make life easier for many young women, and may have won some points for Obama. On the other hand, it’s just as likely that you lost points with your vow to “get rid” of Planned Parenthood, along with other things you’ve said about abortion and birth control. I was a college-aged woman in the 1970s. My primary concern wasn’t getting those services for free; it was being able to get them at all.

And those young adults who can stay on their parents’ health insurance until they’re 26? You’re not the first to take a pot-shot at that. Somewhere back in the campaign cycle, another guy -- it might have been Ron Paul -- said, well, if that’s going to be the rule, we ought to raise the voting age to 27.

I’m tired of hearing politicians speak of this provision like it was some kind of wild, new, un-American idea, because it isn’t.

First of all, it isn’t a “gift.” Young folks up to 26 can be covered on a parent’s health insurance policy if (a) the parent has health insurance, and (b) the parent agrees to keep the kid on as a dependent.

Parents may not have insurance. A lot of Americans don’t. Those parts of Obamacare that say we all have to get some and the insurance companies can’t refuse to sell it to us won’t kick in until 2014. If parents do have insurance, and choose to keep under-26 offspring on the policy, chances are it won’t be free. I’ve worked at places that had group health plans. Most paid at least part of the premium for the employees, but if I wanted coverage for my family, I’ve always had to pay extra for that.

Point two: Young adults need that insurance, and many don’t yet have the means to get their own. We’ve seen some job growth in recent months, but it’s still tough out there, especially for young folks just entering the market. When they find a job, it often comes without benefits. In the two weeks since the election, I’ve heard businesses wailing about Obamacare and how it’s going to break their budgets, how they can’t afford to provide health care for their employees, The complaints all seem to be coming from restaurant chains, and that’s where a lot of young adults work.

Point three: This is not a new idea. Before Obama signed the health care act, before he was elected to his first term, many existing health insurance plans (including the one at my company) offered coverage for unmarried dependents up to age 25. And I personally know quite a few parents who have used that option for kids who were still in school or still trying to find their place in the economy.

Under the new law, young adults can stay on until 26 and it doesn’t matter if they’re married. On this provision at least, Obamacare didn’t make a big, sweeping change. It simply took an existing industry practice, made a couple of incremental changes, and made it a required feature of any policy issued after September 23, 2010.

Gifts, indeed.

Five Good Things About the 2012 Election

Barack Obama won a second term. I’m glad about that, but I didn’t feel like popping balloons and shooting fireworks on election night.

This campaign season was crazy, disheartening, hideously expensive and unconscionably long. And what do we have at the end of it? Same President, same Speaker of the House, same Senate Majority Leader, and more or less the same divided Congress. Is there any hope that our elected leaders will solve any of our pressing problems in the next four years, or will it be the same old gridlock?

Now that a week has passed, and some of the dust has settled, I find a few signs of hope in last Tuesday’s results.

1. Big Money didn’t buy our votes. This was our first presidential contest since the Citizens United ruling. Corporations and SuperPacs spent $billions to elect Mitt Romney and other candidates who would do things their way. For the most part, they lost.
2. Health care reform (the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act, Obamacare, or whatever you want to call it) has survived a Supreme Court challenge and a slew of candidates who vowed to repeal it. Looks like it'll stick around long enough for all its provisions to go into effect. I don’t doubt it will be a rocky road. But I’d rather see the country go down that road, making course corrections as needed, than go back to the way things were.
3. Outrageous comments about rape did not win over the electorate. Missouri’s Todd Akin (legitimate rape rarely causes pregnancy) and Indiana’s Richard Mourdock (if it does, it’s a gift from God) lost their Senate bids.
4. We will, in fact, see some new faces in the Senate, and they aren't all tea-party favorites like Ted Cruz (newly elected in my home state). The League of Conservation voters reports that seven of eight environmentally-minded candidates won. And come January, we’ll have more women in the Senate than ever before. Maybe these leaders will find something better to do than deny climate change and block access to birth control.
5. Texas is still very much a red state, but our House of Representatives will be less lopsidedly Republican than it was during the last session. I suppose that's something.

Corporations Aren't People

Corporations are not people. Anyone with common sense can see they’re not. It’s one of those truths that should have been self-evident, until lawyers got involved.

The 2010 Citizens United decision, in which the Supreme Court ruled that corporations have the right to spend unlimited amounts of money to influence elections, has led to public outrage. Two years later, it’s clear that the newly blessed corporate “right” is not having a healthy effect on our democracy.

But Citizens United didn’t come out of nowhere. Some would argue that the ruling was a logical next step on a path we started down more than a century ago. Maybe I’ll say more about that in a future post. Just now, I prefer to meditate on how a corporation is not like a person.

First, a caveat. For purposes of this discussion, “corporation” doesn’t mean a non-profit group like the Humane Society or the Sierra Club. It doesn’t mean my grandfather’s business, which was a corporation with all shares held by family members. I’m referring here to for-profit corporations that trade on the public stock market.

By law, such a corporation has only one purpose: to make money for its shareholders. And that’s the first thing that makes it different from a real person.

Sure, people like money. Some of us like it a lot, and do a great deal of sweating and scheming to acquire more of it. But ultimately, money is only good for what it can buy. What we really want is food, clothing, security, cars, IPhones, a nice place to live, cool vacations, a big-screen TV and an education for our kids so they can earn money to buy their own stuff when they grow up. Some people use money to gain power and status, bend others to their will, or hire goons to beat up people they don’t like. Whatever a person chooses to do with it, money is chiefly a means to an end.

For a corporation, money is the end and everything else is a means. Anything it does -- bringing jobs to a community, putting out a good or lousy product, making snazzy Super Bowl commercials, buying off politicians, even donating to a worthy cause -- is in service of its real purpose. If those incidental activities don’t pay off (i.e., lead to increased profits), then the corporation will find a way to do without them.

Point two: People are living, breathing organisms. As such, we need clean air, clean water, and food that will nourish our bodies. A corporation doesn’t need those things. It eats only money.

For a person, being alive has a flip side; it means he’s going to die someday. A corporation, on the other hand, is theoretically immortal. It may have a human CEO and board of directors, but those individuals can be replaced. Shareholders come and go as people trade in the market. If a shareholder dies, his stock becomes part of his estate and passes to his heirs. And the corporation goes on.

Point three: A corporation has no conscience, and has no soul.

A wise friend explained this to me one day. We were discussing our investments. Yes, I own stock in corporations, and I’m choosy about where I invest. I try to pick companies that don’t pollute, treat employees decently, and produce things that make the world a better place. I don’t want to believe that corporations are, by their very nature, immoral.

“Not immoral. Amoral,” my friend said. “Morality is outside their frame of reference. An entity can’t be moral or immoral if it hasn’t got a soul.”

I bet I know what you’re thinking. You’re thinking of real, live people you’ve met who appear to have no conscience, already have more money than you could ever figure out how to spend, and are willing to do egregiously unethical things to get more. You’re wondering if corporations are really so different from people after all.

Hold that thought. I’ll come back to it in a moment.

When I first started pondering the morality of corporations. I thought about sharks. A shark, I suspect, doesn’t spend energy worrying about right and wrong. It’s just a fish with big teeth and a taste for blood, swimming through the ocean and devouring any critter that looks good to eat. A corporation, I thought, is like that.

But sharks have a place in the ecosystem, and there are checks and balances in nature that keep predators from wiping out the competition. If you’re among those who believe that God created the earth and everything in it, then God created sharks. I trust He knew what He was doing.

God did not create corporations. People did. Funny thing ... our myths and literature are full of cautionary tales about persons who have taken it upon themselves to create some kind of pseudo-life form and had it not go well at all. Frankenstein’s monster comes to mind. The Jewish legend of the golem. The goblins in Dean Koontz’s creepy novel Twilight Eyes. Somebody dreams up a creature that’s stronger, faster, or more devious, intending to use it as a tool, a servant, a weapon. Instead, the thing turns on its creator and the whole human race.

I think we’re living that story now.

Last Sunday, I saw a piece in the Wall Street Journal about the people who work on Wall Street, and how a surprisingly high percentage are psychopaths or sociopaths. One person quoted in the article said you really sort of have to be one to succeed in that world. Another described a sociopath as “a person with no conscience.” (italics mine)

When you give corporations the same status and rights as people, maybe it’s inevitable that your society will cultivate people who think like corporations.

We’ve created a monster, and now the monster is us.

That Contraceptive Mandate

I got e-mail this week from Senator John Cornyn. He sends out a newsletter called “The Lonestar Weekly.” The lead story this time was about the contraceptive mandate that’s been causing the big firestorm in the media. Pundits everywhere seem to be arguing one side or the other: should faith-based employers be required to provide health insurance plans that cover birth control?

Cornyn, predictably, says no. Not that he, personally, has anything against birth control. Well, he doesn’t exactly say that, but he makes a point of saying contraception isn’t the point:
 “The dispute over the mandate is not a dispute over the use of contraception. It is a dispute over First Amendment rights.”

He devotes several paragraphs to this argument, using phrases like “a blow to one of our most cherished liberties” and “the bedrock principles upon which our great country was established.” His headline vows, “If President Obama doesn't end contraception rule, Congress will.”

Family Connections

I saw a picture in the paper today. People sitting a courtroom, looking much friendlier than they typically do at a trial or jury selection day. The bench is piled with teddy bears and other cuddly critters. In the foreground, a man hugs a little girl while his wife, decked out in a corsage, wipes away tears. The caption says this girl, age 5, was one of 25 local kids who got a new “forever family” on Adoption Day.

A note under the caption directed me to more photos on the website. I found more photos of the little girl with her new parents, and photos of another couple who adopted three boys to add to the three kids they already had. It was a happy occasion all around. Each adopted child got a stuffed animal to take home, and a necklace or bracelet engraved with his or her new name.

Papers, Please!

For the past week, Texas has been on fire. At least 1,400 families have lost their homes and pretty much everything they owned. Some of those are people I know. And the fires are still burning.

As I sit here wondering what I can do to help those friends and co-workers, I find myself fretting about important documents they may have lost. Thirty years ago, that would have been way down my list of concerns. But in this polarized, post-9/11 America, it seems you can hardly do anything without a document that verifies your right to exist.

Taxing Questions

It’s been a long time since I’ve written anything in this space. Not because I had nothing to say. I just didn’t know where to start.

I still don’t, really. But today, I’ll start with taxes. We’ve heard a lot about them in recent weeks. Federal, state and local governments are strapped for cash. They’ve been slashing budgets with a vengeance. Liberal/progressive types think we could stand to raise some taxes -- especially on wealthier Americans, who, they say, are not paying anywhere near their fair share. Conservatives just want to cut.

As a taxpaying American, I wanted to find out where I stand in this equation. So I did a little exercise this week. I dug out all the paperwork I could find and added up the taxes my household paid in 2010. It came to 26.27% of our total pre-tax income. Just over a quarter of each dollar we made went to taxes.

Pro-choice in the 21st Century

Back on the subject of abortion, I appreciate this op-ed that appeared last week in the Washington Post. Written by the former president of Catholics for Choice. Like I said a few weeks ago, a lot of us fall somewhere between the extremes on this issue.

Anchor Babies in Arizona

Sometimes when I feel a great need to write about a burning issue of the day, and I'm still thrashing about for the words that will best express my thoughts, I open up my morning paper and find that Leonard Pitts has nailed it.

Today's bull's-eye was on immigration. So I'll just hush and give you a link to Leonard's column.

My Opinion on Abortion

It’s complicated.

I don’t think abortion is a good thing. I can’t imagine, really, that anyone would. About the best thing I can say about it is that under certain conditions, it may be a lesser evil.

I know there are plenty of Americans who would disagree with that. Who think nothing could be more evil than terminating an unwanted pregnancy. Some of those people are my friends and relatives.

I take back what I said at the beginning of this post. Actually, I can state my opinion in very simple terms:

In a perfect world, there wouldn't be any unwanted pregnancies.

...and we wouldn’t be having this discussion.

The Mentally Ill Among Us

Okay, maybe it isn’t fair to blame the Tucson shootings on Sarah Palin’s cross-hairs map.  Or the weapons-and-combat imagery in the campaign ads of Jesse Kelly, who tried to unseat Gabrielle Giffords in last year’s Congressional election.

Don’t get me wrong. I deplore the hateful rhetoric, the name-calling, the demonizing of anyone who sees things differently, that dominates our politics today. We could all stand to tone it down. But I’m not sure it would have made a difference in this case.

A Decade Remembered

The 21st Century isn’t a new thing any more. As of today, we’re into its second decade. The first decade swooped in and took off again before we came to any real consensus on what to call it. The Aughties? The Naughties? The Zeroes?

Maybe it’s appropriate that we haven’t come up with a name. It’s been a pretty uncertain decade.