Dec 07
AndrewSociety and Culture
The city of Boston is considering a proposal before city council that would ban texting while driving. I’ve never been a big proponent of so-called common sense laws. The question is whether this kind of ban qualifies. Driving laws in general are enacted in the best interests of public safety. A ban on texting isn’t the same as a selt belt law (which I staunchly disagree with) whose sole purpose seems to be to save you from your own stupidity. If that was the case, I wouldn’t support the ban.
No, the cell phone and text messaging bans fall into the same category as obeying traffic signals. The reason is because it is not just your own welfare at risk. Everyone on the road is affected by car accidents. There is a cost to the people involved in the accident, the people caught in the wave of traffic jams that build up afterward, cost to the city and state for road repairs, cost to your insurance company, cost of sending out emergency vehicles to the scene, even sometimes a cost for diverting those same vehicles away from another emergency.
On the face of it, you might argue that banning texting (or for that matter, banning handheld cell phone use) is purposefully designed to legislate people into behavior that they should already be operating under. But I buy into the public safety argument. The rules of the road, the kind you’re supposed to learn in driver’s education and be tested on before you get your license, are there because they provide us with a common understanding of how to work together on the road. They keep us safe as a group when people obey them, and you put people at risk by ignoring them. And let’s face it, there are going to be plenty of accidents that are unavoidable and no one does anything illegal. So maybe encouraging people to act safely when it comes to cell phones isn’t that bad an idea.
Interestingly, the number of states that have already banned handheld cell phone use is actually less than the number of states that have banned texting while driving. In nineteen states (plus D.C.) it is illegal to text while driving (some states, the legislation goes into effect in 2010) and in almost all cases, it’s considered primary offense – which means you can be pulled over for violating the statute even if you are not doing anything else wrong. Just a mere six states have a similar law about handheld cell phones.1
Utah has an interesting compromise. Cell phone use isn’t banned explicitly (text messaging is) but both are incorporated into the state’s umbrella careless driving statute if either is contributory to a moving violation. So Utah wants you to use your phone, but use it with common sense.
I like the idea behind that. I think we don’t empower people enough to take responsibility for their actions and understand how those actions affect themselves and others. But there is a line between a common sense rule that saves you from yourself, and a law that saves us from you.
1 It’s notable that Massachusetts, a state known for the micromanaging of its citizens, has neither.
Nov 09
AndrewSociety and Culture
Massachusetts has a right of way to pedestrians law that is taken to extreme by its residents. In principle, it’s great that the state protects its walking citizenry. In the cold weather, there’s nothing better than being able to keep your feet moving and know that most drivers will yield to you.
But unlike most yield-to-pedestrian rules in other states, Mass residents are empowered to walk into the middle of the street come hell, highwater, truck or beemer. This kind of fearlessness has evolved into a culture where the pedestrian is always charging into oncoming traffic, often without even looking. It puts the onus squarely on drivers not to kill someone.
The problem is that in protecting pedestrians, everyone else on the road is put at greater risk. This isn’t just a case of a reckless driver against a helpless pedestrian. When a pedestrian marches into the road without any thought to his own safety or the driver’s, the scenarios for damage are endless. It can happen in the middle of heavy traffic at rush hour or on a deserted road in the middle of a quiet neighborhood. Pedestrians here act without a sense of self-preservation which in itself drives me batty. But they also put the cars at risk by playing into the legally-reinforced sense of entitlement about who rules the road.
This is a perfect example of how laws that are really legislating what should be common sense behavior would be better managed if we left them up to common sense. Except that nobody has any. Massachusetts is fond of these kind of regulations. Seemingly “duh” laws that only serve to reinforce the fact that most people wouldn’t be able to function without them.
Oct 26
AndrewSociety and Culture
Lately, I’ve been daydreaming of not working. It’s not exactly a unique thing to dream about being unhinged from the day to day drag of a work schedule, especially if your workday looks anything like mine. My alarm goes off at 8 am. Some days, I beat my alarm by an hour or so. I already have the coffee brewed, the eggs on the skillet and I’m sitting in front of my television watching Mike & Mike in the Morning on ESPN 2 waiting for the inevitable Peter Gammons cameo.
Other days, my alarm beats me to the punch. This morning, it is a virtual tie, but man I am dragging. I somehow manage to sleepwalk through my entire morning routine, shower, shave, coffee, eggs and all. I stopped putting on a tie months ago. It takes too much concentration to make everything match. I leave my house at the time I should be pulling into the parking garage. I limp into the office, feeling out of it. My clothes feel too tight today, it is too hot in my office, I am sure I have a sore throat. I feel like someone crumpled me up into a ball and tossed me into the waste basket. And I potentially have four more days of this before the weekend.
I sit down at my desk and listen to the hum of my computer as it warms up. An inevitable message from Microsoft tells me vaguely that something is wrong, that I should be worried but gives me absolutely no information with which to diagnose the problem. I click “ignore” and make a short list of my work priorities for the day which I write on the back side of a budget printout that I will never file. Then I go hunting for the first document, double click on the icon and start working.
Days without meetings run like a slow dripping faucet with a break for lunch to bust up the monotony. Days with meetings tend feel less regimented but I get less done.
Sometime between the 3pm and 6pm, I get the itch to pack up and leave. I am not on a timeclock (probably one of the better perks of being a so-called professional) but if there is work to do, I will stay to finish it. When I’m focused and energetic, I usually stay later. If I’m half asleep and drooling, I leave on the early side, or at least on time when the virtual bell rings at 5pm. And this repeats on and on and on.
I happen to like what I do. I find the work challenging and engaging, except perhaps in the repetition of it day after day. I know I should be dreaming about my next vacation instead of pretending I’m going to leave and never come back. I could probably live for six months on the money I have, but what happens after that?
It’s all rhetorical really. A daydream and nothing more substantial. The thing about working is that it serves a better purpose than just helping someone else’s business run. It provides a sense of accomplishment, helps us mature and employ whatever skills we have. It is occupation but it is also more than an occupation. It frees us to do other things in the off hours and appreciate the time we have when we aren’t at work. And that, more than anything, is why every day we drag ourselves back to reality and get to work.
Mar 16
AndrewSociety and Culture, Television Sex
The Real World got me thinking. I know, strange. On Sunday, MTV aired The Real World Brooklyn marathon and what surprised me is that the cast seemed very “real.” The show in the last, oh at least ten seasons, has seemed very contrived. But this time, the over-sexed castmates came off as immature, whiny, vain and kind of stupid. And I thought, you know, that’s actually a pretty accurate reflection of the new generation of twenty-somethings.
It occurred me to that The Real World is grossly responsible for the societal shift to this kind of sexed-out, twenty-four a day spring break culture (no joke, Season 22 is in Cancun!) Oh sure, spring break behavior is nothing new, but it used to be reasonably contained to spring break, even on MTV. The Real World, long before other reality shows came along, popularized this sort of vain, vacant, pop stars in the making mentality that has dominated its casting for at least the last ten years (I’m looking at you, Tek). They gave up on casting intelligent, mature young men and women with actual lives around season 8. After that, you had to be gorgeous, stupid and have nothing better to do with your life than The Real World.
I guess that manufactured cultural identity was taken for real by its viewers and now The Real World really does mirror a generation that is just mirroring what it had seen on television. That. is fucking scary.
This time around, producers went back to an old school model of letting the cast kind of do their own thing for most of the season. The whole notion of having them work together always seemed unnecessarily contrived to me; I actually approve of the switch back this season. A startlingly number of them as a result (no surprise) wanted to be models/actors which is probably the most realistic reason for them to have tried out for the show in the first place. After all, no matter what Beauty and the Geek pretends to be, reality television hasn’t been about social experiment for a long time now.
The Real World hasn’t been entertaining to me since before they parked themselves in Las Vegas. But this season took on a fascinating social context, (ironic, I know) because the cast’s behavior and attitudes seemed real and believable. I wonder if that isn’t how we expect kids to act these days. Over-sexed, over-stimulated, overreacting. It’s the overdrive generation. And while The Real World didn’t create the overdrive generation single-handedly, the show deserves at least some of the blame. Yeah, producers would just say they are a reflection of what is going on in society. But I don’t buy it. Sometimes, it really is the other way around.
Mar 13
AndrewPolitics and Nation, Society and Culture gay marriage, State Government
Same-sex marriage advocates are holding their breath as the California high court weighs the decision whether to overturn a state ban of same-sex marriage that voters approved last November. The same court, by a vote of 4-3, legalized same-sex marriage last year when it was held that a prohibition against gay marriage was a civil rights violation.
Proposition 8, which received 52% of the vote on the November ballot, effectively banned same-sex marriage in a constitutional amendment, but only after approximately 18,000 same-sex couples were married in the state under the court’s ruling. Advocates are attempting to overturn Proposition 8 by arguing that the effect on the state’s constitution is so extreme that it amounts to a constitutional revision. If the court concedes their argument, then by law, the legislature should have voted and approved the Proposition before it appeared on the ballot (and by extension, that would invalidate the ban itself).
Same-sex marriage advocates are going to lose in California. (Though for what it’s worth, the court has 90 days from the March 5th hearing to deliberate on the issue). The last time the high court weighed in on gay marriage, they were ruling on a civil rights issue. This time, however, the civil rights of homosexuals is a peripheral matter. Advocates will have a hard time meeting the high threshold of reasoning to show that Proposition 8 is really a constitutional revision instead of an amendment. For the court to hold to that reasoning would severely strain the state’s electoral process by questioning its legitimacy.
The political strategy by those advocating for the ban was fucking brilliant. They have thrown the weight and power of the majority of the voting public behind the ban. Against that, same-sex marriage advocates have few options. Bringing the civil rights issue back to the fore is unlikely to sway the court since this is largely a matter of how California’s election process works. Outside the courtroom, advocates are arguing that this is both a matter of how California’s constitution can be rewritten and whether civil rights are being violated in the process of the rewriting. But the courts are not beholden to address the second matter, particularly if they eventually hold, as is expected, that California voters have the right to amend the state’s constitution exactly as they did.
The saving grace appears to be that the court has shown little inclination to retroactively apply the same-sex marriage ban to the marriages that took place before the Proposition was voted on. The court seems disinclined to punish them for opting to get married when it was legal to do so, despite an argument by the ban’s political constituency that those marriages will be left in limbo otherwise. This could give equal rights advocates a small wedge with which to continue to push for equality and gay rights within the state.
Jan 15
AndrewPolitics and Nation, Society and Culture Laws, Smoking
Question: Do you buy the smoking ban argument as a public health measure?
Answer: The “public health” concern isn’t actually addressing the smokers, but the damage caused by secondhand smoke. Employees who work in smoking environments, like casinos, suffer similar damage to their bodies as their smoker counterparts. Susceptibility to lower respiratory track infections and asthma have been identified as damage from secondhand smoke, and in some cases, so has lung cancer and stroke.
Secondhand smoke makes for an easier political argument because it doesn’t explicitly single out the smokers (even if the law itself does). Of course, what has happened in cities where the smoking ban is in effect is that smokers just stand in the doorway and patrons have to walk through a cloud of smoke just to get inside (ever try going to a bar in Boston on a cold winter day and you are practically enveloped by a cloud of cigarette ash making your way inside). Why not make them stand at least 10 feet from the building if you’re going to push them out in the cold anyway?
The state of Indiana is going through the process of trying to pass a bill that would ban smoking in workplace environments. They are deliberately playing up the secondhand smoking effects as a worker protection right. The first attempt at a bill failed last year, and it’s not clear that enough traction exists to get a new version to the floor of the state legislature.
Part of the problem is that employers don’t necessarily support the bill. Casinos and bars, for one, often find themselves lobbying against new legislation, or at least arguing that the bill include certain exceptions to allow them to conduct business as usual. And those employers maintain that if you apply for that kind of job, it is with the understanding of the kind of environment you will have to work in.
Interestingly, the American Lung Association and other organizations that lobby for smoking restrictions play up the number of deaths caused by tobacco use and often talk about how the government has failed to enact enough measures on behalf of the American people. By one estimate, more than 400,000 Americans die every year from diseases related to smoking and secondhand smoke. The premise is the basis for the State of Tobacco Control 2008 report that graded state governments and the federal government on regulations and policies related to tobacco. Those policies would include smoke-free work environments, higher cigarette taxes and tobacco-cessation programs. Twenty-three states currently have smoke-free air laws that are aimed at places of employment.
New York City is currently running an anti-smoking campaign on television that is pretty hard to watch. The commercials are graphic representations of the physical damage smokers suffer. The effectiveness of those types of cessation programs is debatable, but since New York leads the pack on smoking regulations, it seems like this is the next step in the fight to eradicate cigarette use.
It is always interesting to me when the government gets involved in health issues (like the trans fat menace and nutrition facts on restaurant menus) to see which issues have the momentum with the public. The smoking ban definitely does. But here’s one curious fact, while cigarette sales have declined around 20% in the last ten years, sales of other tobacco products has seemingly taken its place. So are Americans smoking less but using largely the same amount of tobacco? The American Medical Association, for one, says that is probably the case.
The public health argument around banning smoking has always been that while smokers themselves have a choice whether to smoke, those around them are given little choice whether to be exposed to secondhand smoke. It is always going to be a more compelling argument than protecting smokers from themselves. I’m not a big fan of excessive government regulation and I do think smokers have paid the freight on this particular issue for a while now, from social pressures to higher taxes. But ultimately, the role of the government is to represent what the majority of Americans support, so as long as reflects that outlook, it’s hard to argue against.
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