(This is the last of a series. I promise that future posts will be a bit shorter!)                                              

Tolerance

By Patrick F. Cannon

Intolerance begins with difference, and is abetted by ignorance.  That difference could be of color, religion, nationality, sexual orientation, politics, or any of a number of things that set people apart. Like most people, I found it difficult at times to tolerate some of these differences.  Although the teachings of the Roman Catholic Church have changed since I was educated in its schools, I was most certainly taught by the nuns that only Catholics could go to Heaven, and that Protestants and Jews were at the very least misguided, and maybe even willfully evil.  Needless to say, sex education was not part of the curriculum.

Since many of the kids in our building and neighborhood were Jews and some Protestants, it began to dawn on me at an early age that either both my brother and I were playing with a posse of the damned, or perhaps the nuns were overdoing it just a bit – thus, the beginnings of tolerance.  Tolerance of sexual orientation came later, since I’m sure I wasn’t even aware that such people as homosexuals even existed until I graduated from high school in 1956 and moved to Chicago. In those days, homosexuals were forced to live in a shadowy world, moving in very limited circles, including so-called “gay” bars. I’m sure I shared the general distaste with a sexual orientation I didn’t understand.

But, again, once I began to actually know, socialize, and work with gay people, I realized they were pretty much just like me, except for what they got up to in the privacy of their bedrooms. Since this didn’t affect me, why should I care? Yet, many people do, mainly on religious grounds. While the biblical evidence against homosexuality they are so fond of quoting is ambivalent, particularly in the New Testament, their real problem is that they confuse the Bible with the Constitution. The Constitution permits them to rail against homosexuals all they want on religious grounds, but it doesn’t permit them to also discriminate against them in the civic arena.

But people seem to struggle most of all with race. Although young people are notably more tolerant, their parents may have grown up in families with a history of casual or even overt racism. My own parents never (at least to me) expressed any racist sentiments. My father was a politician for a time and no doubt valued any vote he could get.

My mother would often take us to the drugstore at the bottom of our street in a Pittsburgh-area mill town for a soda or sundae, or to buy some candy. The druggist was known to us as “Doc.” It was only later in life that I came to realize that he was an African-American. Later, in high school, my best friend was an African-American (sorry for the cliché).

It was only when I moved back to the Chicago when I was 18 that I discovered overt racism. Chicagoans of a certain age will remember that many restaurants and other establishments refused service to African-Americans even into the 1960s. Discrimination in housing and employment were commonplace (and you could argue, still are). While middle- and upper-middle class African Americans are finding it easier to find housing in better Chicago and suburban neighborhoods, their poorer brethren are still stuck in highly segregated neighborhoods, where black on black crime is epidemic.

One often hears the argument that anti-discrimination laws and racial preferences have now leveled the playing field, so the African-American community has no one to blame but itself for any lingering problems. But ask yourself this: can we really pat ourselves on the back for waiting until the 1960s to take the first steps in making things right for a people who had been enslaved in British America from the early 17^th Century until the Civil War finally freed them in 1863? And even after they were freed, in much of the country they continued to be discriminated against for the next 100 years, with some of the discrimination even sanctioned by law.

At its source, racism is personal. Common sense suggests that each of us must acknowledge its long history in the United States, then pay more than lip service  to the idea that each person must be judged “by the content of  his character,” not his race. To the extent that it’s within our power, we must be sure that decisions we make on hiring, housing, education and especially friendship are never based on race.

Finally, we need to take a common sense approach to immigration reform. Where is the common sense hidden in the proposal that we can deport 11 million illegal immigrants?  Or that we should simply let anyone in who fly, walk or swim to our shores? The zealots who espouse these extremes are in the minority. The majority who support compromise must be made to realize they can find common ground that might not be perfect (compromise rarely pleases everybody) but that would represent real progress in providing some kind of legal status and dignity to those who are working hard to support their families.

It’s only common sense, isn’t it?

(Patrick F. Cannon has written five books on architectural subjects. He isn’t always so serious.)

 

 

More Common Sense

Education

Let’s leave the question of educational testing aside, and instead talk about education. What should every student learn, first in primary and high schools, and then at colleges and universities? What is the minimum that one should learn in order to be a contributing member of society?

First, every student should learn how to read, write and speak the English language.  Instruction should take place every year, and it should be rigorous. Age appropriate English and American literature must be included, both to show examples of how the language has and is been used, but also how literature has reflected the lives and culture of Americans. By the time a young person has graduated from high school, he or she should have read at least some of the classics written in English by writers of both sexes and all races that have contributed to the diverse culture of the United States. This means Shakespeare and Dickens, Twain and Hemingway, Emily Dickenson and T.S. Elliot, but also Richard Wright, James Baldwin and Sandra Cisneros. It also means the theatre and, yes, the movies.

Related to this is the ability to write clear English prose. Not English prose as the student wishes it to be, but as it actually is. Over the course of my working life, I reviewed literally hundreds of resumes from people who wished to be hired for writing jobs, but couldn’t in fact write grammatical English. How could this be, I wondered? How had they managed to graduate from respected universities without mastering this basic skill?  I could only conclude that none of their teachers had either bothered or cared. Permitting a student to be “creative” should only come after demonstrated competence.

Much more emphasis needs to be placed on history and civics.  No child should graduate from high school without passing a test on the Federal and state constitutions. And not only on the documents themselves; specific examples must be given to demonstrate how the various articles and amendments actually affect their lives.

History should not be taught until a child can reasonably be expected to understand concepts and connections, perhaps as late as the fifth grade. Then it should be taught in increasing levels of sophistication until a high school graduate should know the history of his country, with both its triumphs and tragedies. And no university graduate should enter the real world with a view of history and politics tainted by the ideology of professors who are more advocates than scholars. Not exposing students to all sides of an issue is a betrayal of the very idea of the university.  And that means that the study of history must be a requirement for graduation, not merely an elective.

The Arts

Literature is only one of the arts. At a minimum, a high school graduate should be exposed to the major composers of the past as a way of giving context to what is currently popular. The history of music in all its periods and styles is far too complex for most high school students, but exposure to the main strains is not. That means both Bach and Ellington. It means raising questions like: what influence did African rhythms have on the development of Jazz? In what ways did the blues influence rock? Just what is the great American Songbook?

Most high schools will have opportunities for musical performance – band, orchestra, chorus, etc. But even students who don’t have the talent or inclination for performance should be exposed to their musical heritage. And it’s important that such courses not be tested in the usual way. It should be enough to occasionally ask the student to write down what they think about a particular piece of music. No grades. If you show up and listen, you pass. The arts should be treated as enrichment, not burden.

I’m a great believer in the power of exposure. For example, my love for classical music began quite by accident. My first real job was setting pins at an Elks Club bowling alley. One of my extra tasks was to clean and buff the alleys on Saturday morning. After doing so one day, I was leaving the club when I heard music coming from a sitting room that contained the club’s television set. I stopped in the doorway, and what I heard and saw was Arturo Toscanini conducting Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony. While a similar experience might have happened later in life, I can say with certainty that that experience changed my life.

Although perhaps much more complicated, an introduction to the visual arts is also important at every level.  While one could reasonably argue that actual courses in the history of art should best be left to the university level, works of art could well be used to illuminate other subjects, history and geography for example. Visual artists have and continue to respond to the events around them, particularly those that affect society most, like war and injustice. Instead of simply using their images as passive illustrations, why not discuss the artist and his or her reasons for creating the work in question.

Math and Science

Not every child will have an aptitude and passion for mathematics and the sciences, but just like the arts, every child should be exposed to them. The study of the various branches of mathematics teaches a child that there is indeed an actual answer to a specific problem. One and one will always equal two, not only when we want it to. There is also a scientific method, and every child should be taught how it works and what it means. I cannot stress this point too much in an era when the internet continuously exposes one to all manner of bogus scientific nonsense.

Alas, there are many private schools that permit parents to insulate their children from reality. Religious schools should, of course, be able to teach religion, but not as a substitute for accepted scientific fact. When I was in Catholic schools from 1944 to 1952, I was taught that God created the heavens and earth in seven days. Imagine my surprise when I later learned that the solar system was billions of years old. Religious schools must not be able to get away with this kind of stuff, but be required as a matter of state interest to have the same basic scientific curriculum as public schools.

While there may be some limited justification for home schooling, most parents do so through a fear that their children will be tainted by exposure to the school environment – fully 90 percent of those surveyed gave this reason. 75 percent said they home schooled their children so they could provide moral instruction, with 65 percent specifying religion as the primary reason. And while most states require these children to take the usual standardized tests to prove competency, they cannot test what else their parents teach them. I would suggest that home schooling be permitted only in cases of extreme physical or mental disability. Religion (or some quasi religious or mystical mumbo jumbo) can be taught at other times, but at least children will know that there is a fact-based world as well.

Despite the best efforts of the courts to put a stop to it, we even have some public school districts who believe that religion has a place in their curricula. Aside from the Pledge of Allegiance (the addition to which of the phrase “under God” was to me a great mistake), Gods or religion have no place in public education, nor does the teaching of anti-scientific courses in so-called “creation science.”  Let the preachers spew this nonsense from their pulpits all they want, but students must be made to face the reality of natural selection and the geologic record.

Of course, religion and its texts do have a place in the study of history and literature. How could they not, considering the effect – for both good and ill – that they have had, and continue to have, on the human experience?

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Copyright 2015, Patrick F. Cannon, all rights reserved.

 

(Patrick F. Cannon is the author of five books on architecture. He also has an opinion on just about everything, hence this blog.)

 

Common Sense (With apologies to Tom Paine)

 

By Patrick F. Cannon

 

Common Sense is both the title of a pamphlet written by Thomas Paine in 1775 to make the case for independence of the American colonies from the control of the English king, and a concept that says that there can be a reasonable solution to any problem, one that sensible people can agree upon.

Well, since so many of our problems, both politically and socially, persist, it must mean that the number of reasonable and sensible people is insufficient. Or, to put it another way, one man’s common sense appears to be another’s nonsense. In my long life, I have been guilty of my share of arrogant intolerance, coupled with an absolute belief in the rightness and, yes, the wisdom of my opinions. Over the years, my wife, who is both tolerant and sensible, has suggested that not everyone might agree with me on every issue, and for legitimate reasons. Now, I find myself occupying what I could describe as a mellow middle.

It has become axiomatic that we live in a polarized society. In politics, the common-sense center has seemingly lost its place. The far left of the Democratic Party persists in its belief that only government, financed by heavily taxing the rich, can solve our problems (problems as defined by them). The far right of the Republican Party takes the view that the government is the problem, so that the less it involves itself in people’s activities, the better. It’s a kind of “every man for himself, survival of the fittest” idea.

Those who hold these extreme positions are now considered the “base” of their respective parties.  Even a moderate politician feels he or she must pander to the extremes, at least on some issues, to get elected.  And pander they usually do, because no sooner are they elected to office than they begin campaigning for reelection. Although they were sophisticated in most respects, the Founders did not foresee the emergence of the career politician. There are always happy exceptions, but most office seekers now tailor their opinions to encompass the largest number of voters. If the base says the rich don’t earn their money, but steal it from the poor, then let’s take it away from them without a qualm. Or conversely, why should we subsidize a lavish lifestyle for people too lazy to make it on their own?

Both the far left and right practice what I call “knee jerk” politics. This involves speaking before thinking, automatically opposing the president and programs of the other party. Currently, this involves Republications opposing every action of President Obama, no matter how benign, just as the Democrats could find nothing positive about the actions of George W.  Bush. You have only to listen to the party mouthpieces that populate the “knee jerk” networks, MSNBC and Fox, to find proof of this.

Do you see yourself in these extremes? Then, my friend, you are indeed part of the problem. Gridlock is the result of your inability to believe there might be a middle way that would actually make some progress possible. What you see as bedrock principals are really only your opinions, aren’t they?

Views on tax policy help define the extremes. The left sees the so-called “one percent” as getting rich at the expense of the middle and working classes. If only we taxed them more, we could use their presumably ill-gotten gains to help the victims of their greed. The reality is that the top 10-percent of earners already pay 70 percent of the taxes, and that more than 40-percent of the rest pay no Federal income taxes at all. And the rate that the top 1-percent pay has consistently gone up over time. In 1980, they paid 19.29 percent of the total federal income taxes; by 2010, the percentage had risen to 37.38.

And because they own more property, and more expensive property at that, the top earners also pay a very high percentage of total real estate taxes (as do their evil corporations). And, of course, their lavish lifestyles fill sales tax coffers at a higher rate. The sales tax on that $200,000 Bentley you see tooling around Beverly Hills or Lake Forest would be about $20,000 in Illinois as opposed to $2,000 on our Ford Focus.

Nevertheless, a very small tax increase on the highest earners would not be a bad idea, as would an increase in the gas tax, which has not increased in decades. But this would be anathema to the far right of the Republican Party, most of whom have signed a pledge not to raise taxes. Hovering over them like a dark shadow is a curious personage named Grover Nordquist, who apparently wields some sort of mystical power. I won’t even hope for tax reform, which everyone says is needed, but which hasn’t actually happened for several decades.

Political Courage

This would be a good place to pause and wonder why so few politicians exhibit political courage, which I would define as doing the right thing even when you know it might have serious negative consequences come the next election. Not being reelected would be the most serious, but there are others. A famous case comes to mind from Illinois.

In 1893, Governor John Peter Altgeld pardoned the remaining prisoners convicted of complicity in the Haymarket bombings. He, and later historians, concluded that they had been wrongly convicted. He also opposed the use of Federal troops in the Pullman Strike. For his stands, he was defeated for reelection in 1896. But who now thinks he was wrong?

In our own time, most people believe that sensible gun control laws would benefit the country. At the very least, serious background checks to prevent felons and the mentally ill from obtaining guns seems a common sense approach. Yet, it doesn’t happen, presumably because the National Rifle Association (NRA) doesn’t want it to happen. If they vote for gun control, legislators fear that the NRA will work to defeat them at the next election. In this, they are perhaps correct. But what if the majority had the guts to do the right thing and actually pass a stricter background check law that included everyone who sells guns, not just licensed dealers? Would the NRA have the cash and resources to run candidates in all those districts? And with a public that supports the measure, what good would it do them? Isn’t it worth finding out?

You might also try an experiment. During the next election cycle, follow the candidates and determine how their stands on the issues compare with those of the majority of their constituents. For example, if the electorate over time has come to believe that gay marriage isn’t so bad after all, has the politician come to the same conclusion, even though in the last election cycle he or she adamantly opposed the idea? You can do this on any number of issues, but don’t be surprised if their bed rock principles now seem just a bit mushy, Hillary Clinton’s turnabout on the Asian trade agreement just one case in point.

Religion

The concept of religious freedom seems to be particularly confusing to a good many people.  Let’s return to the ever-handy Founding Fathers to see what it’s supposed to mean. Most of them hailed from what is now called the United Kingdom, where whether you wanted to or not, you were required to financially support the established state religion, in this case the Anglican Church. This rankled, particularly if you happened to be a Methodist, Quaker, or, God forbid, a Roman Catholic or Jew. So, when they decided to free themselves from this and other depredations of the British crown, the Founders naturally were anxious to avoid establishing a state religion.

What they did instead was to tell religionists that they were free to practice their faith without interference from the government. Indeed, that non-interference has extended to a general freedom from taxation for most of their activities. That’s a pretty good deal, and common sense suggests that organized religions ought loudly to cheer the government and mind their own business.

Alas, as we know, large numbers of adherents really believe that governments at all levels should embrace the moral strictures of their particular religion. This belief seems strongest among the evangelical Christians, many of whom believe that “the word of God” as expressed in the Bible must be accepted at face value. Thus, for example, they can find support in it for rejecting homosexuality as a sin, just like murder or stealing.

Now, some of us may think this is ridiculous, but accept that such people are entitled to their beliefs.  But when those beliefs spill over into the public arena, it goes beyond protecting “the establishment of religion” to the use of religion to discriminate against a class of citizens. The legalization of gay marriage has brought these attitudes to the fore.  There have been many cases of business owners refusing to provide services related to same-sex marriages, and public servants refusing to issue marriage licenses to gay couples.

Now, there exists a dwindling number or private clubs that have discriminatory policies. So long as they remain strictly private and do not offer their services and facilities to non-members, they are relatively safe from governmental interference. But a business that opens its doors to the public generally is deemed to be a public accommodation, and therefore cannot deny its services arbitrarily.  (There are exceptions, of course. If a jurisdiction has a law against public nudity, for example, a business owner can justifiably refuse service to a naked lady, no matter how attractive). And, of course, no public official, regardless of their religious convictions, should be able to flout established law, however personally distasteful. Resignation is always an option for those who put religion above their public duties.

The country’s embrace of religion has made it virtually impossible for an admitted atheist, or even agnostic, to successfully run for public office at any level. More than 90 percent of Americans profess a belief in some kind of God; and a majority actually believes that a politician who does not cannot be trusted to make moral and ethical judgments.  Thus, a politician who may be a non-believer is forced to profess belief, only one of many ethical compromises that he or she will sadly or gladly make to get elected. It might be instructive to study this diverse list of atheists to see how many have served time in prison for breaking one of the Commandments: Andrei Sakharov, Kevin Bacon, A. Philip Randolph, Dave Barry, Arthur C. Clarke, Katherine Hepburn, Sigmund Freud, Ira Glass, James Cameron, Steven Hawking, Niels Bohr, Joseph Conrad, and of course, Mark Twain.  None perhaps can measure up to the moral stature of religionists like Jim Bakker, Jimmy Swaggert, Ted Haggard and Billy James Hargis.

 

Economics is Simple!

I took Economics 101 (I actually think that was the course title) at Northwestern University. I did whatever it took to pass the course, promptly forgot everything I learned, and went on with my life. And it was actually living that life day by day that provided the real education in economics. I can now define what I learned thusly: eventually you have to pay the bills. This applied to my personal life, and to the companies and organizations I worked for over the years. In my last job, I controlled a budget north of $15 million a year, money provided by dues-paying members. Our goal was to spend less than we had coming in, thus building a reserve for an uncertain future. When inflation and other factors suggested we could use more money, we asked the members to pay higher dues. Because they knew that we were careful with their money, they usually agreed.

It never occurred to us to borrow what we needed. Now, for-profit corporations do this all the time. If they’re well managed, the amount they borrow is in proportion to their sales and assets.  If it gets out of whack, there’s a danger that when the economy heads south, all that’s left is bankruptcy and happy competitors. We need look no further back than 2007, when there were roughly 28,000 business bankruptcies, up from about 20,000 the year before. By 2009, the figure was over 60,000.  As we know, these were not all mom and pop operations.

Then, of course, we have the government, or, rather, the governments. Let me posit a principal that would save everyone a lot of money over time. It’s this: vital services should be performed by the smallest unit of government that can actually provide them, vital being defined as those people can’t provide for themselves. Here’s a case in point. The State of Illinois passed legislation to provide park districts around the state with funds to do some good stuff.  My own community, Oak Park, naturally applied for some of the dough and was awarded a grant. When Governor Bruce Rauner was elected, he put a hold on these grants, mentioning the obvious – the state was broke.

The fund should not have existed in the first place. If Oak Park wants to improve its parks, it should ask its citizens directly for the money. Why should everyone in the state send money to Springfield, then send it to Oak Park?  If a community is too poor to provide adequate park facilities, why not have the county government take care of them? You get the idea.

The Federal government has been running a deficit for so long that we are entitled to ask a simple question: why?  If you asked economists this question, you would get a variety of answers, proving, if it needed proving, that economics is anything but an exact science. Some would even argue that having annual deficits and a huge national debt is a good thing. While I have not named names in this essay, except for the mysterious Grover Nordquist and Hillary Clinton, one Nobel Prize winner of a liberal persuasion argued that the $800 billion stimulus passed to help end our last recession should have been double that amount. And, more recently, he even urged that Social Security benefits be increased, even though the fund would be insolvent with current benefits by 2033 (or whatever).

While this isn’t the place to explore the pros and cons of going to war in Iraq and Afghanistan (it’s too late for that), it is a place where we might reasonably ask why the country wasn’t asked to pay for them, instead of borrowing the money and going more deeply in debt? Why are our soldiers the only ones asked to show courage?

But let’s not get bogged down with these and other arguments. The reality is that the Federal government (and others as well) has for many years been operating on borrowed money. It does so because our politicians refuse to do either one of the two alternatives (or ideally a combination of the two) that could eliminate or at least stabilize the situation. One is to tailor the size of the government to its income; the other is to increase the income to match its size.

As mentioned, actual tax reform seems an impossible dream. In the short term, as already posited, a modest increase in rates, and the elimination of the more blatant deductions, would go a long way. And while it’s seemingly impossible to ever eliminate a program, the cost of their administration could be lowered. For example, the food stamp program has a large bureaucracy that decides who gets stamps, how many, and what they can buy with them. And there are several layers of government getting a piece of this action. Why not simply do away with the food stamp program altogether by deciding how much additional income a low income family might need in food assistance and make that amount part of the earned-income tax credit?  The people who worry that the “poor” might spend the money on booze or potato chips should find something more important to worry about. Given the chance, most people, even poor people, would choose not to starve to death.  It’s just common sense, right?

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(Patrick F. Cannon writes about Chicago architecture and architects. His fifth book, The Space Within: Inside Great Chicago Buildings, will be out early next year.)