Child-Rearing in Public

One of the commenters on That Other Blog has problems with other people’s over-indulged kids acting up in public, and their parents standing ineffectually by.  I guess I’ve seen that once or twice in my life.  It may reflect the kinds of neighborhood I frequent that I see abusive parents and their kids in public places a lot more often.  It annoys me just as much, and in addition sometimes puts me in a moral quandary.

I was brought up in Florida, which was still pretty Southern at the time. That may account for the fact that it wasn’t until I moved up North for college that I first heard a parent tell her child, “I’m going to kill you.”  I heard it fairly often after that.  These were white, more or less blue-collar parents in New England.  When I moved out to Chicago, I saw a somewhat different pattern: African-American parents telling their kids, “Sit down and shut up, stop crying, sit still!!”  And sometimes reinforcing words with slaps.  The kids, in all the instances I saw, were doing nothing worse than crying. Most of them weren’t even doing that. They were just squirming or waving their arms or trying to get up and walk around. The thing that bothered me most was that most of these parents (in fairness, some of them were undoubtedly grandparents) seemed to take absolutely no joy from their children. No, this is not a function of poverty, as nearly as I can tell.  Hispanic and Asian parents in what appears to be the same income bracket generally look really happy with their kids, even when the kids are acting up.

The more middle-class parents I see usually don’t pick on their kids by yelling at them and slapping them. They are more subtle and more annoying about it.  The ones who tell their kids, “If you don’t stop [whatever], I’m going to call the policeman and he’ll put you in jail” (how on earth are the kids supposed to know that the policeman is who you go to for help?) The ones who tell the kid to stop [whatever] because “you’re bothering that lady”, meaning me.  (I am not the least bit bothered, except by being used as a club to beat up on a helpless child.)

Obviously I’m not the only person who sees this kind of thing. People write to advice columnists all the time about it.  The columnists, who are probably nicer people than I am, generally say that the way to respond to these situations is to offer sympathy or even help to the abusive parent, who is probably just really overwhelmed.  Maybe so, but on the rare occasions when I have tried to talk to a mother in this situation, I generally get told to mind my own business.

Which I can sort of understand, from the other side.  From the first instant a woman starts to look pregnant, until the last day she appears in public with anybody too young to vote, her parenting skills and the conduct of the said young person are fair game for the entire world of total strangers to comment on and advise.  It may or may not take a village to raise a child, but the village certainly feels entitled to kibitz on the process whenever they get the chance.  Unless I see abuse rising to a level that would interest the official child welfare establishment (which so far I haven’t, and having worked in the Juvenile Court system for many years I’m quite familiar with the standards), I figure everybody is better off if I keep my mouth shut.  I do give occasional “know-your-law” talks in the community, which gives me the chance to talk about the official standards for child abuse and neglect to people who are actually interested in listening or they wouldn’t be there.

But these issues seem to make a lot of parents feel that their children simply don’t belong in the public realm at all until they’re old enough to go to the mall by themselves.  Of course, keeping kids at home in front of the television until they are teenagers who can be dropped off at the mall means that they will probably behave really obnoxiously at the mall, since they have so far had no chance to practice proper public behavior.  This is not a solution.

The solution, I think, lies in all of us—parents, non-parents, ex-parents, future parents—accepting our obligation toward the next generation, who will after all be paying the Social Security and maintaining the economy of childless people in this generation.  They need us, and ultimately we will need them.  So in the meantime, parents need to be willing to bring their children out in public without feeling either embarrassed or belligerent about how the kids behave, and willing to accept kibitzing from strangers, and non-parents need to be willing to tolerate and even encourage small people who are not yet very good at sitting still and shutting up.  Any society that is not willing to share in accommodating the next generation doesn’t deserve to have one.

CynThesis

The Technology of Exposure

Does Privacy Require Anonymity?

More and more transactions are requiring picture identification documents.  An airline ticket used to be a negotiable bearer document–if you had it, you could use it, or you could give it to somebody else, or sell it.  Now it must be purchased by the person who intends to use it.  If s/he turns out not to be able to use it, s/he must turn it in for a refund, which the airline may or may not choose to provide.

This seems to be the wave of the future for intercity railroad and bus tickets as well.  Even paying in cash does not free the would-be traveler of this obligation.  (However, city and metropolitan public transportation tickets can still be purchased anonymously for cash.)

Driving a car, of course, requires a driver’s license.  Now, increasingly, buying a car does too.  And that car can be tracked by various street-corner videos and tollway security cameras, though so far not with any easy way to confirm who is actually driving.

Merely walking in and out of public buildings or on public streets and sidewalks can involve getting your picture taken, in still or video, with varying degrees of readability.  Using an ATM will almost certainly get your picture taken, but since you have to use a personally keyed card in such a transaction anyway, it matters only if you are not the person properly attached to the card.

Banks are now required, under various federal statutes against “money-laundering,” to report cash transactions involving $10,000.00 or more. And a person who carefully breaks down such transactions into three transactions of $3333 apiece can be prosecuted for evading such statutes.  Carrying large sums of cash can be a ground for suspicion of all kinds of offenses.  Your credit card, of course, enables any government agency to track your purchases by date, time, and place.

ID of some sort is usually required to rent a post office box.  If you make a phone call, the person on the other end will probably be able to ascertain who you are from a “caller I.D.” facility.

The only countervailing forces are new technologies which enable you to purchase a cell phone or a credit card and put money into its account in cash over the counter.  Never having done this, I have no idea what kind of I.D. is required for the transaction.  Nor am I willing to hazard a guess about how long law enforcement will take to require production of a picture ID for such transactions.

The purpose of all of these new strictures is to make us safer from money-laundering, drugs, and terrorism.  Have they made us any safer?  They haven’t been around long enough to tell.  My personal guess is that the larger quantity of information now available on the comings, goings, and financial transactions of each of us cuts both ways.  More can be known about us, but most of the agencies capable of accessing that knowledge lack the resources to read and use that knowledge effectively.  And the more information there is, the harder it is for the appropriate agencies to use it.  We found that out before September 11, 2001.  It turned out we already had lots of information on most of the hijackers.  But we were so badly backlogged in reading it that we didn’t know what we had until weeks or months later, when it was long since too late.  (One of the techies commenting on this problem in the months immediately after 9/11 pointed out, “You don’t get any better at finding needles in haystacks by adding more hay.”)

My guess is that, no matter how much information we gather on the lives of our ordinary citizens and residents, we will prioritize it for review based on what we think we already know about its subjects.  So we will continue to suspect “the usual suspects,” and let the moles and sleepers go their way because they are smart enough not to look like the usual suspects.

Does that mean that these new strictures do not impinge on our freedom?  Alas, no.  Certainly they impinge on the freedom of “the usual suspects,” about whom more can be known, and more limits placed on their lives, than ever before.   What this probably does is enable governmental and corporate authorities to protect their own power from dissidents and activists, and people with darker skins and flatter wallets than their own. Which may drive some of the usual suspects into the ranks of the terrorists, but will certainly not make us any safer from the real Bad Guys.

It’s scary to know how much information about us there is out there.  It is both more and less scary to know how much of that information is inaccurate.  For instance, I regularly get spam in my e-mail based on the assumption that I am a single Christian male with bad credit, erectile dysfunction, and a dog.  All but one of those assumptions is dead wrong.  My husband somehow got onto the mailing list of a psychic hot line that spells his name wrong!  He also regularly gets mail from the Hispanic Bar Association, despite the fact that he is neither Hispanic nor an attorney.  (Obviously all this stuff was meant for me, since I’m both, but this tells you a lot about organizational sexism in the Hispanic community.) We both get lots of attempts at contact from people who sell aluminum siding and other goods and services appropriate only for the owners of single-family detached houses, even though for 40-plus years we have lived in a multi-family building.

And those of us who read and write speculative fiction, as well as the political loonies at both ends of the spectrum, may also worry that, if governmental and corporate power is seized by the Bad Guys (or is already in their possession, depending which conspiracy theory you buy) we and the other Good Guys are already in their gunsights and no longer have any way to protect ourselves by “silence, exile, and cunning.”

On the other hand….

I do not share the idea of the self-proclaimed guardians of our privacy, such as the ACLU, that caller ID infringes the privacy of the caller.  When you make a phone call, you don’t have any privacy.  You are stepping outside of the zone of your privacy. You have no more right to conceal your phone number from the person you call than to knock on his door while wearing a mask.

Similarly, I believe that video cameras in public places do not violate the privacy of the people who frequent those places.  IF YOU WANT PRIVACY, STAY HOME!  In the public realm, your face is visible to all. All a camera does is make that visibility more durable in time. (No, I won’t get into recent burqah litigation, thank you.)

I am also not opposed to the idea of a universal ID.  On the contrary, I think we would be better off having it.  Places of public accommodation would no longer be able to discriminate against those they do not wish to serve, by claiming that their ID isn’t “good enough.”  We would know exactly which ID is good enough.  I think a universal ID would be a lot better than our current use of the driver’s license for that purpose.  People who are too old, too young, too disabled, or too poor to drive would no longer be reduced to second-class citizenship.  And the driver’s license could be returned to its original purpose of ensuring that people who drive are competent to do so, regardless of their immigration status.

That takes care of the present, and the technologies now available to pierce the veil of anonymity.  What about technologies that now exist but are not yet in wide use? For instance, what about medical information chips?  We already have them for our pets.  Cats, dogs, and horses get “chipped” for identification and to insure proper and prompt treatment for medical problems.  So far, only upscale animal owners bother with this, because it’s expensive.  But the price will come down fairly quickly, and at that point we may start to wonder why sauce for the cat cannot also be sauce for the cat’s person.  Are the chips a violation of privacy?  Do they improve our chances of getting the right emergency care when we are in no shape to demand it?  In theory, the answer to both questions is yes.  In fact, I suspect that medical chips will get used the way Medic-Alert tags get used now–when and as it’s convenient for emergency responders.  Most of us know of people who wear Medic-Alert bracelets, who have been picked up by paramedics who don’t bother to read the bracelets (sometimes with disastrous results.)  No technology is any better than the people who use it.  But what is absolutely certain is that the chips will be used first, not by medical professionals, but by insurance companies.  The insurers will devise some way to make sure that the people they insure get “chipped” with a complete record of all diagnoses and treatments, in order to avoid insuring anybody whose medical past they don’t like.  This will, of course, provide the patient with less medical care, not more.

In the meantime, we all carry “smart cards,” such as credit/debit cards, bus passes, and library cards.  Most of those, at least theoretically, enable Them to track Our movements anywhere within reach of a card reader, which is most towns, cities, and businesses.  Should I leave my smart cards home?

And what about the technologies we can imagine, or are even in the process of implementing, for the future?  That really is the realm of speculative fiction, and the gee-whiz crime investigation TV shows that recklessly tread the border between what we can already do and what we can imagine doing (or could do if our governmental agencies had the money.) We could use public video to identify every person who crosses a particular intersection, or all intersections.  We could run that information through real-time information processing that would set off an alarm every time a camera sights a person wanted for a crime, and direct the police to his current location to arrest him.  Because we generally prefer paying for gadgetry to paying for the people who use it, we probably will never have enough cops to actually respond to every such alarm.  Or the resources in the criminal justice system to prosecute and lock up all the offenders caught this way.  So we will concentrate on information emanating from the places we consider most important, either because of their proximity to the people and places we are willing to take the trouble to protect, or because of their likelihood of turning up large numbers of the usual suspects with minimal effort.

In short, if we merely use advanced technologies to do more, faster, of what we are already doing now, we will merely get more of what we are getting now, faster.  Only if we would be satisfied with that as a goal should we bother pursuing it.  Or, as Mr. Wired explained early in the days of the computer, what we learn from computer technology is that it is possible to get a reputation for being extremely smart simply by doing one or two stupid things very quickly and very often.

Red Emma

The Sexual Revolution Keeps Going Around

That Other Blog keeps harping on the evils of the Sexual Revolution and why Our Culture will wither up and die if we don’t reverse it. I guess it’s time for a review of the facts, at least from the point of view of a history major-turned-lawyer who has spent a lot of time in divorce court and juvenile court:

v The Sexual Revolution didn’t start in the 1960s. In fact, it wasn’t a one-time only event at all, except to the extent that technology played a role. The Romans had one, which Augustus Caesar deplored big-time, while of course, like almost every other opponent of his era’s sexual revolution, playing a major role in it. The French had several, one in the Middle Ages, one during the Second Empire, and one in the late 19^th century. The Brits had at least one per century beginning in the late 1500s. And the good old USA had one in the early 1800s and one that began in the 1920s and is arguably still going on.

v As is obvious from the previous paragraph, no Sexual Revolution is irreversible.

v The current Sexual Revolution may be different from its predecessors because of the contribution of contraceptive technology. But even that doesn’t make it irreversible, since even in societies where contraception is readily available, not every sexually active person chooses to use it, or even considers it a matter of choice at all.

v The Good Old 1950s weren’t all that good. There was at least as much teenage sex as there is today, and somewhat more teenage pregnancies per capita. That phenomenon was cloaked by frequent resort to Shotgun Marriage.

v These days, even our most upstanding citizens (Bristol Palin, for instance) consider that an undesirable compromise. In fact, the Catholic Church ordinarily will not perform a marriage while the prospective bride is pregnant. Obviously they consider unwed motherhood preferable. Some personal anecdotal stats: in the year before I was due to start high school, half the girls in the graduating class of the public high school I would ordinarily have attended were pregnant. Including my cousin. Which undoubtedly had something to do with my spending the next four years at a convent boarding school. So far as I know, all of the young women in question got married well before their due date.

v But I suspect that the Sexual Revolution is responsible for the decrease in math skills of our younger generations. My classmates and I, all the way through high school and college, got to exercise those skills quite regularly calculating just how premarital our friends’ sexual activity was, by subtracting 9 months from the birth of the baby, and then subtracting that date from the wedding date. Probably none of the current younger generation could work that out even with a calculator.

v Not to mention, of course, the fact that today’s youth are a seriously lost generation, at least in terms of geography, since most of them can’t even find their own state on a map. Before Playboy, young men had no place to look at nekkid wimmen except National Geographic. Yes, we can blame that on the Sexual Revolution too.

But OTOH–

v Back in the Good Old Days, when a young woman was found dead of non-natural causes, the first thing the coroner checked for was pregnancy. Because pregnancy was an equally plausible motive for either suicide or homicide.

v Those shotgun marriages ended in divorce far more often than marriages contracted under less precipitous circumstances.

v Even current data tells us that such marriages are more likely to involve abuse.

v That doesn’t even begin to deal with the issue of homosexuality as a cause of blackmail, homicide, and suicide (and divorce and infidelity.) Yes, that still happens today, but not nearly as much as back in the Good Old Days.

Yes, there are things I don’t like about post-1960 attitudes toward sex:

v The fact that young girls get pressured into it to please other people (boyfriends or girlfriends or occasionally even parents) and often get absolutely no pleasure or reward from it.

v The fact that most of those young girls cannot imagine using contraception, and in fact consider pregnancy a highly desirable outcome, at least in comparison to ordinary high school life.

v The dangerous intersect between drugs and sex (although not much different from the link between alcohol and sex in the Good Old Days.)

v The fact that the major cause of death among pregnant women these days is homicide (probably an unintended consequence of our more stringent enforcement of child support laws.)

v The child support laws themselves, which seem to expect happy young couples to include in their repertoire of pillow talk an inquiry into the male’s date of birth and Social Security Number.

v The declining prestige of marriage, except among lesbians and gay men. (It enjoyed a brief boom among Catholic priests and nuns, but that population has now aged beyond marriageability and dwindled almost beyond recovery.)

So the Sexual Revolution was neither an unmixed blessing nor a universal curse. Like many other social phenomena, it is both cause and effect of our culture as a whole. It has affected some people much more than others. And we still haven’t figured out all of those effects, or how to modulate them. We certainly haven’t figured out how to repeal it. I don’t dream of trying.

Red Emma

Marriage–A Mother & Father for Every Child

Last Monday, 200 same-sex marriage opponents showed up on the law of the Vermont State House with buttons proclaiming, “Marriage—A Mother and Father for Every Child.” This perturbs me a bit. The main cause of children not having both a mother and a father in the home isn’t gay marriage, it’s runaway men. Occasionally it’s runaway women. But what is the Religious Right doing, or even saying, about the all-too-frequently exercised right of fathers to walk away from their children? Not a whole lot. In most states, the statutes criminalizing desertion and nonsupport of home and family are either unenforced or have long since been repealed. I don’t know of anybody trying to get them back on the books.

And so far, medical science has not devised a way to prove a particular man is the father of a particular child without a DNA sample from both. I would support a Nobel Prize in medicine for any solution to this problem, or perhaps even a Peace Prize, given the social significance involved. Actually, in the interests of gender equity, what I’d really like to see is something that would cause every man who impregnates a woman to develop a facial rash and some other highly visible, bothersome but not dangerous symptoms that would last at least 9 months.

But obviously, if we can’t find runaway fathers, we can’t persecute them. As long as homosexuals were closeted, they had the same protection. “Don’t ask, don’t tell” is a basic moral principle in our culture. Which suggests very strongly that what most anti-same-sex-marriage advocates really object to isn’t what gay people do in the bedroom, but the fact that they have the nerve to talk about it in the public forum. Marriage is only the most public way to make homosexuality public. If they’d stop holding parades, and publishing books and periodicals and blogs, and forming organizations and support groups, they could **** and *********** to their hearts’ content.

Which is a constitutional issue. We don’t object to gay sex. We object to gay speech. Speech is protected by the First Amendment. Maybe that’s because the Framers knew how much people want to limit public speech, given half a chance. Sex—well, it depends which Supreme Court opinion you read and when and by whom it was written. A lot of the folks on the Warren Court seemed to consider sex protected by the First Amendment, but these days that argument doesn’t fly, even with the current court “liberals.” But it wouldn’t really have to fly, if people would just shut up about it. Even the most restrictive of conservative judges has never advocated setting up an entire corps of jackbooted thugs to randomly police bedrooms, because we would really rather not know what goes on in them.

Which, I suspect, is only a special case of a much larger issue. We Americans don’t want to hear about people who are different from ourselves. We particularly don’t want to hear about how oppressed they are, or how badly we behave toward them. We will allow each oppressed group, as part of the “liberal bargain,” a few days a year to air their grievances all over the mainstream media, coast to coast, in glorious Technicolor and stereophonic sound, while we tune out, turn off, and watch football. Our willingness to grant them that much proves what nice people we are. After the few properly licensed days of exposure, the issue, whatever it may be and regardless of what, if anything, has actually been done about it, becomes “dead,”. As in dead horse, comma, beating.

Indeed, the Religious Right seems to value most the right of its members not to be thought of as bigots for being mean to various oppressed minorities. Being called a bigot is apparently an existential threat to many conservatives. It is often the reason given for opposing not only same-sex marriage, but even public advocacy of same-sex marriage. “If we let you talk about it, you’ll call us bigots for not letting you do it.”

Enough already. I favor same-sex marriage because, as a divorce lawyer, I see so little of fidelity and mutuality and sharing in this world that I refuse to be picky about who practices them. I also favor it because any excuse for a good party is a significant contribution to the quality of life. Also, it’s good for the economy. Caterers, wedding planners, dressmakers and haberdashers, and the manufacturers of small appliances all need all the help they can get. If you don’t like same-sex weddings, don’t have one.

Red Emma

Eyes on the Street

 

 

These days, video cameras are everywhere. They no longer even depend on the whim of individuals fooling around with their toys, like the guy who accidentally taped Rodney King being beaten up.  Cameras are permanently set up all over the place.  ATMs, building entrances, lobbies, banks, intersections, virtually anyplace capable of supporting the negligible weight of today’s video cameras.

 

Some people, lamenting the loss of privacy, find this unsettling.  I yield to no one in my fervor for civil liberties. But I like the omnipresence of video cameras.  Whose privacy do they violate?  If you leave the four walls of your own home, place of worship, meeting room, or romantic tryst site, you have no expectation of privacy.  If you want privacy, stay home.  Or at least pay cash.  I think I might feel differently if the cameras also recorded audio. Fortunately, given the ambient noise level of the great urban outdoors, that would be wasted effort anyway.  So if, in the course of a conversation with a friend as we walk down the street, or sit in a restaurant, or ride a bus, I malign the president or the war, I don’t expect to be electronically overheard.

 

But if somebody zooms through a red light and gets caught on camera, three cheers!  If somebody robs me at an ATM, his face is preserved for posterity, and that’s just fine.  If I have to walk through a questionable neighborhood on the way to my car, I’m comforted by the knowledge that somebody somewhere is monitoring my progress and my safety.

 

Yes, I have been somewhat spooked by police taking pictures at anti-war demonstrations.  The proper response, which seems to have been picked up quickly, is to take pictures of the cops in return.  Both can be useful in court later, especially as proof of what didn’t happen.  I’ve already gotten one client acquitted on 6 felony charges, based on such a video.

 

The down side of the ever-present security cameras isn’t that they erode privacy. The real down side is that they are a symbol of the end of visual community, what Jane Jacobs used to call “eyes on the street.”  By which she meant, not electronic doohickeys, but real live people with the time to watch what went on around them and the inclination to respond appropriately to it or testify about it as necessary.  Jacobs located such people on front porches and similar semi-public places.  Front porches are mostly unoccupied these days.  The people who used to hang out there are much more likely to be at work, if they are able-bodied enough to be useful as witnesses.   Or, in really dangerous neighborhoods, they are inside, with the shades down, unwilling to be seen, and especially unwilling to be seen seeing any illegal act.  So, on one hand, it is sad that we need an electronic replacement for such human vigilance. On the other hand, it is good that we have one.

 

Jane Grey