With more than 2.3 million people behind bars, the United States leads the world in both the number and percentage of residents it incarcerates, leaving far-more-populous China a distant second, according to a study by the nonpartisan Pew Center on the States.
Daily Archives: March 5, 2008
Is Integration Always Good?
21 bar rises 30.00 1mh WSW windchill 19
Waning Crescent of the Snow Moon
Ethnonationalism may seem an antique or xenophobic topic, but this article in Foreign Affairs suggests not.
Singapore made me scratch my head about an American article of faith segregation bad, integration good. Little India, Chinatown, Malaytown, Arab Street and the old English quarters exist alongside each other with little apparent friction. Apparent is a key word because speaking to Singaporeans I found Malaya’s and Indians who talked about discrimination in the larger community. There’s also the matter of the undercover police that monitor Singaporean’s daily activity.
White’s and Chinese have long been part of Singapore’s ruling elite so they tend not to have the same concerns. Even so, I noticed a vibrancy and a sense of cultural identity in the ethnically defined communities that I do not notice in similar communities in the US. Also, well after midnight, I saw women walking alone through relatively deserted city streets.
To expand on experiences from the same trip the Thai people have a wonderful sense of identity and cultural assurance based on their long experience in the same geopolitical region; likewise the Cambodians, though their situation has deep seated corruption and the legacy of the Pol Pot years that complicate their situation.
I don’t know if all this has any application in the US where our value of the melting pot has long history behind it. Even that history though has an ethnonationalistic twist. The Civil Rights law of 1964 opened immigration to countries outside western Europe, especially to Asians who had been excluded since the days of the Yellow Peril. Until 1964 our immigration policies favored Anglo-Saxon countries. Then there was the 3/4’s compromise and the resulting shame of slavery for which we paid in blood and destruction.
Part of what made me think about this was recent material I’ve seen advocating separate classrooms, even schools, for boys and girls. Are we blind to some truths about human nature, or are we visionaries, a city on the hill, lighting the way for the rest of the world when it comes to a multicutural society? God, I don’t know, but this article made me think.
The Days Look Potent
26 bar rises 29.93 5mph NNW windchill23
Waning Crescent of the Snow Moon
The angle of the sun has changed; the days look potent, ready to burst open and let plant life smash through winter. Even the snow today has a futile, last gasp appearance. It is not the snow fury of midwinter when the drifts pile up and driving snow blinds motorists, making the home a cozy refuge. Yes, temperatures will plunge the next couple of days, but we know this is just the Hawthorne Giant reluctant to let go his grip on the land. The Oak King has already seized the season, opening the eyelid of nature wider and wider until one day soon the snow will melt and the ground begin to thaw. Then, all hail breaks loose.
This drama, the back and forth of seasonal change, is not felt in the tropics. I remember the struggle my brother Mark had explaining snow to his classes of Thai students learning English. How to grasp cold and frozen water falling from the sky when all you know is wet seasons and dry? As a child of this land between the Rockies and the Appalachians, the vast Midwest, and as an adopted son of the northern reaches of it, the seasons long ago seeped into my bones. The sun’s countenance changes and I know it; I know it in the animal part of my brain that tells me when it’s time to migrate toward the growing season or to put up stores for a coming winter. The subtle variations between late season snow and the early spitting of snows in November have deep meaning for me. We are, all of us, practitioners of meteoromancy, attempting to tell our futures through cloud cover, length of day and temperature.
I would have it no other way. Visiting the tropics is wonderful, a chance to see another life way, another adaptation to the planet’s many faces, but to live there, to wipe out lifelong learning about spring and its puddles or summer and its heat, does not appeal to me. This has been and will be my home. As I said the other day, I am kama’aina of the heartland, a child of the Upper Midwest on the North American continent and this is where I belong.