Scapegoat

     Few people seem to know the etymology of the word "scapegoat". It is in fact a contraction of "escape goat", a sacrificial animal that in certain cultures was sent into the wilderness, presumably to be eaten by wolves, and taking the community's wrongdoings with it. Hence, the modern practice of "throwing someone to the wolves" to assuage consciences and erase a wrong.

     These days, however, the people tend to see through such attempts to shift the blame. If an oil company, for instance, causes damage to the environment, they can't get away with simply firing one executive, as if he or she was the only one at fault. And so when people want to persuade the public to go along with their scapegoating, they have to be sneaky. They have to play on our natural suspicion towards them.

     Take this case, where Evelynn Hammonds, a dean involved in the Harvard email searching fiasco, is resigning. The flak from those events is reportedly "not a motivating factor" in her decision. My first reaction to that was, essentially, "Oh, right. This has NO connection. I totally believe it, she must be guilty." My second reaction was "Wait. Why the heck did I just think that?" If the majority of the populace doesn't have that second thought (not an improbable occurrence, as comparatively few people second-guess themselves), then Harvard has quite neatly created itself a scapegoat, without technically doing anything of the sort. What does this say about our trust, or distrust, of public figures and institutions? Does "innocent until proven guilty" only apply in official courts of law, and not in public opinion? 

     Also, Dr. Hammonds is both the first female and the first African-American dean at Harvard. Do certain groups make better scapegoats than others? What would have happened if Dr. Hammonds was a white male?

     Lastly, note what it says on the Harvard coat of arms: "Veritas", which is Latin for truth. Is Harvard living up to its ideal? If Dr. Hammonds' resignation really isn't motivated by the email incident, but is perceived that way regardless, who is lying: the university, to the people, or the people, to themselves?

Crutch

     Once you've depended on something once, it can be hard to learn to do without it. If a parent helps you with your homework one night, you're liable to immediately go to them when you have a difficult problem in the future, which will make for a sticky situation in college, if not sooner. When a foreign power has been holding your country upright for years, you may struggle to find your feet when they start to turn away. Same same. Either way, the metaphorical crutch you've been leaning on goes poof, and you discover your legs have atrophied.

     I did not pick the second example at random. If you've been reading the news at all, you probably know that Afghanistan is having more than a little trouble putting itself together after give-or-take three decades of war. Neither the US nor NATO nor any other "Western" power is in charge there - there is a government running most of the country. Or trying to. Attempts at stability aren't exactly helped by incidents like this. A police officer searched a vehicle (an only intelligent policy in an area where, bluntly, lots of people want to blow something up) that turned out to belong to the son of the most important military commander in the country. This guy proceeded to have his minions (unless they were flunkies) beat the crap out of the policeman. (The difference between the technical definition of minions and flunkies is that minions have to take orders, i.e. if they were soldiers and the guy was their CO. Flunkies are just hired muscle, and unlike minions, do not count as abuse of official power.)

     Say what you want about the United States's involvement in the Middle East, we never did anything quite that entitled. For all our attempts to encourage democracy everywhere we go, this event and others like it make Afghanistan seem more like a feudalism, with military commanders regressing into warlords inflicting their will on commoners as they please. This impression is reinforced by the whole father's-influence thing, especially when one learns that the son, too, is a ranking military officer. (Did he earn his rank, or just inherit it?) And as in medieval history, the central government oftentimes fails to, or cannot, control the ones who theoretically answer to them. (Although in the Dark Ages, the commoners didn't have the ability to go on television and tell the entire planet. Maybe progress isn't a myth.)

     So how does this affect the plans for troops to leave Afghanistan next year? Don't go thinking this is an isolated incident, this policeman could very well be the only one with the nerve to report it. Does the West have an obligation to stick around and help fix the place, or would that just be "America playing the global police force"? Maybe they genuinely need our help, others would say. Still others would reply that there's nothing we can do, we're throwing good money after bad, et cetera. Perhaps the solution can be reached through policy and diplomacy, rather than a physical presence. Who knows? No one, probably, but ten to one plenty of people have an opinion. Let's hear it.

Interpreting the First Amendment

     Interpretation has always been a big part of how the First Amendment freedoms are enforced. We learned earlier this year that it was only recently, historically speaking, that freedom of speech was even taken seriously. Well, has that table ever turned now.

     The National Labor Relations Act, or NLRA, is essentially a list of all the things your employer can't fire you for. The idea is to keep companies from denying rights to their workers through fear of unemployment. But as Teresa Tritch of the New York Times recently observed, "Employees have rights under the N.L.R.A., but no right to be informed of those rights" (full article here). Why? The First Amendment. Requiring companies to tell their workers anything at all would abrogate their freedom of speech, which is not only the right to say whatever you want, but also the right to not say whatever you don't want.

     Whenever I see two laws working against each other, I feel like there must be a deeper issue at the center of it. In this case, the problem is freedom of speech. In general, I'm a fan - as someone who plans to become a journalist, it's difficult to be against it - but I do feel like it's gained an aura of infallibility it doesn't deserve. There are instances when information does not want to be free, and it shouldn't be. There are even more instances when invoking the First Amendment turns into a legislative "so is your face", an irrelevant remark designed solely to make the other guy shut up. Requiring companies to post a poster doesn't seem much different than requiring the city to put up speed limit signs, or making toy manufacturers put safety information on boxes so small children don't choke. It's simply a method of telling people how their world works and what they can expect.

     So where do we go from here? Do we continue as we have begun, and preserve the freedom to not speak? Has the First Amendment, crusader of democracy, gotten too big for its britches and our needs? Or is there a way to reconcile the two sides, and keep freedom of speech at its current levels while enacting a little spirit of the law to deal with those who take it out of context? America doesn't do a whole lot of spirit of the law, seems to me, or fewer people on trial would get off on technicalities and loopholes. But hey, it's not my question to answer. Comments please! Exercise your freedom of speech.

How Do You Say '500 Billion Dollars' In Spanish?

     Mexico gets no respect around here. People in this country seem to have the lowest levels of tolerance towards people of Hispanic descent I've ever heard of, classifying all of them as Mexicans. Studying for Spanish tests, I have had people come up to me and tell me to "stop speaking Mexican". And of course we have armadas of digital talking heads blaming Mexico for the US unemployment rate with the traditional "they're stealing our jobs" rhetoric.

     Leaving aside the fact that this is overt racism, hasn't anyone noticed that it's not true?

     Mexico is a huge economic help for the US. Trade with Mexico in 2011 totaled over half a trillion dollars, split only slightly unequally between imports and exports (ustr.gov). Have you heard of NAFTA? There's a reason that the North American Free Trade Agreement exists! (If anything, we stole their jobs on that one, when cheap corn from America put small farmers all over Mexico out of business. Leading in turn to them trying to come north for work - we created our own immigration problem.) President Obama himself has remarked on Mexico's bad rap: "Sometimes I think we forget this is a massive trading partner responsible for huge amounts of commerce and huge numbers of jobs" (nytimes.com).

The text on this Mexican peso translates to "United States of Mexico".
Just another example, albeit a poetic one, of the links between our countries.

     Do people not recognize how much Mexico helps us? I don't like to think that, since the people are the ones who control which direction this country goes in, but I suppose it's possible. It's the nature of the world that successes are thankless and failures get you only blame. Chalk one up in favor of the thickheaded / ignorant / uninformed hypothesis. On the other hand, plenty of anti-Mexico-ites are, other than that, intelligent and informed. So am I missing something here? Some reason for all the odio? Some factor that makes the public judgmental and biased? Something that Mexico actually did to us? Or am I going off on a tangent, and this isn't the big issue that it seems like to me? Let's hear the opinion of the people about the opinion of the people.