The White House announced that it has adopted a looser policy on airstrikes against the Islamic State (ISIS) in Syria. The United States has been conducting airstrikes against ISIS, and a strike allegedly killed a dozen citizens in Syria. A spokesperson for the National Security Council, Caitlin Hayden, said that President Obama’s policy of only using airstrikes when there was “near certainty” that civilians would not be harmed is not applicable to the airstrikes in Iraq and Syria. This policy has lead to a decreased number of airstrikes, since it requires that each strike be signed off by the President himself and others in the chain of command. However, Hayden claims that these rules were only intended to apply in situations when airstrikes are used in areas that are not “areas of active hostilities,” arguing that airstrikes in actively hostile areas such as Syria do not have to follow the rule. Hayden also said that all strikes have been conducted legally and that the Pentagon will investigate civilian casualties.
When Being Right is Not Enough
What does it mean to be on the right side of history? It’s easy to look into the past and see where the line has been drawn. It has been found in leaders who have initiated social progress; those with strong convictions and stronger actions, who have stopped at nothing to improve the societies they live in.
Making the Case for Cursive
The introduction of technology in the classroom seems like a win-win situation, but psychologists and neuroscientists are hesitant to write handwriting off as a thing of the past. From learning to read to generating new ideas, studies have proven that handwriting enhances a child’s ability to learn. Studies also revealed that messy handwriting also has benefits as well in that “variability [of different types of handwriting] itself might be a learning tool.”
Climate Change? Really?
The thought of global climate change is quite unsettling. No one wants to actually believe that our planet is heating up so much that there are enormous droughts in the Midwest, destructive storms off the coasts, and massive flooding as icebergs melt and water levels rise. The average American already has too much on his or her plate to add “save planet earth to the list of to do’s.” So, many people instead decide it is better, and easier, to just not think about it. Yet, this failure to acknowledge the fact that global warming is real and to make life adjustments to try and prevent the destruction of our planet highlights an ethical issue rampant in our society today; failure to take responsibility for our actions.
Global warming is not made up. MSN News reports, “Driven by exceptionally warm ocean waters, Earth smashed a record for heat in May and is likely to keep on breaking high temperature marks.” If you are a person who usually takes a back seat to global issues such as climate warming, it is time to grab the steering wheel and take control of not only your future, but the future of your family in generations to come.
A tremendous call for action was seen just a couple weeks ago as tens of thousands of demonstrators gathered in the streets of Manhattan in an unanimous plea to reverse global climate change. Last week, the UN Climate Summit commenced at the UN headquarters in New York with the goal of creating an action plan and discussing new initiatives to combat climate change.
What role can I play?
First, stand up and take responsibility for your actions. No one is perfect, but we can all make a greater effort to protect our planet so it lasts for future generations. The Climate March should stand as encouragement for all to make more eco-friendly life decisions. Simple things like recycling, carpooling, shorter showers, and re-usable water bottles and silverware may seem small, yet in the long run, they add up.
If you’re even more ambitious, reach out to friends. Encourage them to be eco-friendly, and make them more aware of the threatening situation of global climate change we currently face.
We don’t have time to ignore the blatant, and scary, signs anymore. Global warming is happening regardless of whether we as a society choose to believe it or not. So, what are you going to do about it? Challenge yourself to be better and accept the ethical responsibility to work toward change. What else can we do to combat global warming?
No More Deaths: Fatal realities of border militarization
No More Deaths is a Tucson, AZ based humanitarian aid organization working to prevent the deaths of migrants crossing the Mexico-US border.
According to Kate Morgan-Olsen, a long-term aid worker with No More Deaths, “The organization provides food, water, and medical support to migrants crossing through the Tucson sector of the border; documents and exposes the human rights violations that migrants experience at the hands of US law enforcement; and works in coalition with Tucson organizations to address racist laws resulting in mass deportations of undocumented members of local communities.” The article, “Designed to Kill: Border policy and how to change it” provides a first-hand account of the impossible situations that No More Deaths seeks to stop. It was originally published by an anonymous author who has worked as a long-term desert aid volunteer, coming face to face with the most ruthless circumstances that the desert renders.
When envisioning the border, one likely sees something along the lines of a vast wall that separates one nation from another. However, the author explains that in Arizona there is no need for a physical border because the desert itself is a trap that allows very few to escape. For this reason, migrants die on border territory to the forces of heat, exhaustion, dehydration, starvation, trauma and injury every single day in exchange for the possibility of a new life. Border authorities are far from unaware of the cheap, disposable labor that those who make it will provide.
Facing death in the desert is anything but a choice for most migrants. With the enactment of the North American Free Trade Agreement on January 1st, 1994, Mexican agricultural communities faced privatization of what were often once communal lands. Beyond this, subsidized U.S. agribusinesses began to compete with local farmers, putting many out of work. As the gap between the global North and South began to widen exponentially, many were forced to migrate.
With these realities at hand, everything we know or are taught to believe about the intentions of border authority comes into question. What is our role to stop death in the desert, and is what some consider a “Band-Aid” solution enough to stop the violence?
Interested in learning more about the work of No More Deaths? Please join us on Wednesday, October 8th from 4:15pm-5:30pm in Academic Quad at DePauw to welcome Kate Morgan-Olsen. Kate is a past long-term volunteer with No More Deaths and will speak to the work the organization does while also giving a context of border history, how it developed, and why it is so deadly.
Time to Give NFL’s Blackout Rule the Boot
Originally appeared in The Indianapolis Star
The Federal Communications Commission is supposed to ensure that the electronic media serve the public interest. A current FCC rule, however, works primarily to serve the interests of a few of America’s wealthiest individuals. That’s why the FCC appears poised to end its blackout rule for National Football League games.
For many years, NFL television contracts have prohibited the broadcast of any game in a local market in which the stadium is not sold out. The NFL wants to guarantee the revenue stream that sold-out stadiums provide, even though some economists claim there is no connection between broadcasting games in the home market and fan attendance.
The FCC decided in 1975 to support the NFL’s local blackouts by also prohibiting cable or satellite services from importing broadcasts of those games. Thus, the NFL, which already has anti-trust protection from the government, also has had FCC collaboration in preventing fans from seeing their hometown teams on television.
Late in last year’s football season, acting FCC chair Mignon Clyburn proposed getting the commission out of the sports blackout business. Clyburn questioned whether the blackout rules were in the public interest, “particularly at a time when higher ticket prices and the economy make it difficult for many sports fans to attend games.”
FCC commissioner Ajit Pai had even stronger words against the rule in a speech last month in Buffalo: “I don’t believe the government should intervene in the marketplace and help sports leagues enforce their blackout policies. Our job is to serve the public interest, not the interests of team owners.”
The location of Pai’s speech is noteworthy. The Buffalo Bills’ games have been blacked out more often in recent years than any other NFL team. By the way, it’s often bitterly cold outside when late season games in Buffalo are played. And the Bills haven’t had a winning season since 2004.
Current FCC chair Tom Wheeler also has announced his opposition and will call for a vote to discontinue the blackout provisions at a meeting later this month.
The NFL faces fourth and very long in its efforts to keep the rule, but that hasn’t kept it from a massive lobbying and public relations effort, complete with scare tactics and half-baked reasoning. The NFL, for example, has enlisted the National Association of Broadcasters to threaten that elimination of the FCC rule could lead to all games being telecast only on pay services, not free over-the-air channels. In fact, that could happen only if the NFL itself chose to move in that direction.
The NFL also has gotten the support of the Conference of State Legislatures and the Congressional Black Caucus to claim that elimination of the rule would hurt local economies by keeping fans away on game days, thus harming stadium employees, nearby restaurant owners and so forth. The reality is that stadiums fail to sell out when teams lose too often or inclement weather interferes. The FCC blackout rule doesn’t fix either of those problems.
The NFL generates about $10 billion a year in revenue, with the biggest chunks from television contracts and merchandise. Ticket sales aren’t as big a factor as in 1975. The NFL money machine generated $275 million in new revenue this fall by signing CBS to air eight Thursday night games. That should be more than enough to cover a few empty seats in Buffalo in December.
Virtually all NFL owners are billionaires. Meanwhile, television ratings hinge on the eyeballs of millions of fans who can’t afford to pay high prices to attend a game, many of which are played in stadiums built with taxpayer money. It is high time for the FCC to end this 40-year losing streak and win one for the fans.
Ending Sexual Assault: The Fraternity Question
Much has been said of the markedly high rates of sexual assaults on college campuses. While the conversations all point to different solutions to the problem, many revolve around the same source: the disproportionate amount of sexual assaults committed within fraternities.
Continue reading “Ending Sexual Assault: The Fraternity Question”
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The FDA and Banning Shock Therapy
The FDA is currently debating whether skin shocking devices should be banned for use on patients with autism and developmental/intellectual disabilities that display self-harmful or violent behaviors. The only treatment center to use skin shocks, the Judge Rotenburg Center in Caton, Mass., treats 55 patients with skin shocks. The center and some families claim that these skin shocks have been the only way to treat the violent behavior of certain disabled individuals being treated at the center. The skin shocks are delivered with a device attached to the arms or legs, called a GED or graduated electronic decelerator, which delivers a 2-second shock to the patient when he or she becomes violent or self-harmful. Before the center can use the shocking device, they must be granted court approval. The center and various patients describe the shocks as equivalent to a bee sting or a hard pinch; others say it is worse than that, with one comparing it to being “stung by a thousand bees.” Another patient claims that the shocks are terribly painful, and have caused nightmares. However, one mother said that the only treatment that worked on her son was shock therapy, and told the FDA via video, “Do not take away what is saving his life.” An advisory committee for the FDA identified that the devices pose a high risk, although they noted that some less jarring therapy methods have proved ineffective.
Won’t You Be My Neighbor: Thoughts From a Prindle Reading Group Participant
ZMapp: The Solution to Ebola?
The outbreak of Ebola in Western Africa has captivated the international community since it began in February 2014. Although Ebola has broken out before, this is the largest outbreak ever. It is suspected that over a thousand people have died, and many more continue to fall ill. Some of them have been American citizens. Two American aid workers, Dr. Kent Bradley and Nancy Writebol, have been cured, after treatment with an experimental Ebola treatment called ZMapp. After this news came out, many people began to wonder why the drug had not immediately been sent to Western Africa.
Apocalypse Now: Hollywood and the End of the World
Few events are as captivating of the human imagination as the apocalypse. Whether seen in ancient religious texts or modern novels and video games, on some level it seems we’re all concerned with and captivated by how it’s all going to end. But when such a fascination begins to reflect real life, are there any ethical concerns to address?
Continue reading “Apocalypse Now: Hollywood and the End of the World”
What the Ray Rice Video Suggests About Our Moral Thinking
At 1:00 AM on September 8 TMZ posted a disturbing security video showing Ray Rice, formerly of the Baltimore Ravens, punching his then-fiancée, Janay Palmer, rendering her unconscious. At 11:18 AM the Ravens tweeted that Rice’s contract had been terminated. At 11:41 AM, the NFL tweeted that Rice had been suspended from the league indefinitely.
Here’s at least one odd thing about this: it was already known that Rice punched Palmer and rendered her unconscious. As early as February 2014 there were reports of what the video depicted. So, why the outrage now? Why the sudden calls for action? After all, nothing morally relevant is changed by the fact that now many people have seen the punch rather than merely having been told about it.
Perhaps you’re like me, though. Although there were reports of the incident in February 2014, you weren’t aware of the incident until now. There’s nothing about seeing the incident that changes its moral features, you might say, it’s just that the video gave the story a wider reach and now you’re aware of it. This, in turn, increased the pressure on the Ravens and the NFL to take action.
That’s perhaps a comforting thought, at least with respect to our reaction to the case (it’s not so comforting a thought with respect to the Ravens and the NFL). But it masks a thought that is less comfortable, even for you and me. The less comfortable thought is that even if you or I had known about the incident in February, we still probably wouldn’t have responded in the same way as we did after seeing the video. Why? Because there is considerable psychological evidence that our moral responses to cases are strongly influenced by our emotions. [1. For a nice, accessible, summary of some of this research, see Joshua Greene’s 2013 book, Moral Tribes (Penguin Press) His website includes additional papers on the same topic] And—for most of us anyway—seeing a video of domestic violence is much more emotionally engaging than reading a dry report of the same thing.
This should give us pause. Sure, suffering might feel worse if we see it, but does it really make it worse? It seems not. A seen punch hurts just as much as an unseen one; a child that we see starving suffers just as much as one that we do not see. There’s an important lesson here: our moral psychology can sometimes fool us into making spurious distinctions. Our proximity to suffering or way of learning about suffering is not plausibly a morally relevant feature of it, but we often treat it as if it is.[2. This is not a new point. In his 1972 paper, “Famine, Affluence, and Morality”, Peter Singer writes: “The fact that a person is physically near to us, so that we have personal contact with him, may make it more likely that we shall assist him, but this does not show that we ought to help him rather than another who happens to be further away.” (p. 232).] This can have profound consequences, not just with respect to domestic violence in the NFL, but with respect to us playing our appropriate moral role in the world.
Can Death Row Inmates Save Lives?
There is no question that, in many cases, it is ethically wrong to kill. But is it possible for it to be ethically wrong to save a life?
In an “ethically troubling” situation in November 2013, death-row inmate, Ronald Phillips, requested to donate his organs (his kidneys to his mother, and his heart to his sister), one day before he was scheduled to face lethal injection. While this life-saving intention seemed rather simple, this unprecedented case of death row donation in the state of Ohio presented a conundrum of ethical issues to Ohio governor, John Kasich, who asked for an additional 230 days to review the case. Kasich eventually denied Phillips’ request to donate his organs, contending that the act may not be medically feasible. Regardless of the verdict, this case remains to hold ethical importance because of the nature of the different parties involved.
Abolitionists Unfrozen
This article, by DePauw History professor David Gellman, originally appeared in Historians Against Slavery on August 15, 2014.
If all the great abolitionists of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries were cryogenically frozen, who would you reanimate to help liberate the world from the scourge of slave labor and human trafficking today? Frederick Douglass? William Lloyd Garrison? Harriet Tubman? Are there any antislavery activists you would just as soon leave in cold storage?
The culminating paper assignment in my “The American Experience: Abolishing Slavery” course asks students to contemplate such questions in order to thread history together with contemporary society. When we think of the millions of present-day victims of bondage, neither triumphalist narratives nor facile condemnations of the past remain satisfying. But, if I have done my job right over the course of the semester, the students have figured that out already and just need a final prompt to confirm the urgency of history as a tool for reimagining and reconstructing the world.
The actual written text of the topic is less glib than my opening paragraph suggests. Slavery is a somber subject. Still, one walks a fine line engaging 19 year-olds. I want them to take the subject and themselves seriously. Common sense and humility, however, tell me that writing a college paper is not saving the world—that almost all traditional writing assignments are exercises, indeed games, through which students play at being the intellectuals, leaders, activists, and citizens that they are in the process of becoming. The assignment reads more like this:
Apply what we have learned from attempts to abolish slavery in colonial America and the nineteenth century U.S. to the problem of contemporary slavery. Which types of people, organizations, and ideas from the past does the world most need now? Which ideas, people, organizations, and ideas would you transport from the past to the present if you could?
But when explaining the assignment verbally or when pushed to answer the inevitable student questions What do you want? and What are you looking for?, the cryogenic conceit of the assignment becomes more explicit. The disciplined imagination that scholar James Axtell identified as the stuff of good history is also, the topic proposes, the stuff of social and political engagement. Or put another way, this final paper topic gives me one last chance to drive home to students that there is no readily searchable right answer to really important questions, just the answers that they wrestle out of themselves from within.
So then the practical questions become: What sorts of readings do I deploy during the semester to prepare the students for this capstone encounter with today’s global slavery? What, as the course ends, do the students have inside that they can start to pull out and craft for the printed page?
I organize the course around biography. I feature the lives of women and men who played significant roles in the struggle against slavery in North America from colonial times through the Civil War. The cast of characters rotates from one version of the course to the next, a combination of quality texts, thematic coverage, and representativeness guiding my selections: Douglass, Garrison, Sarah Grimké, and Angelina Grimké have been staples. Tubman, John Brown, and David Walker have stimulated lively discussion and debate. Quaker pioneers Anthony Benezet and John Woolman have made valuable appearances, and Samuel Sewall’s 1700 essay “The Selling of Joseph” provides a useful prologue. In the 2014 version of the course, Solomon Northup became an irresistible addition, particularly since we were able to bring the film 12 Years a Slave to campus that same semester. Marcus Rediker’s retelling of the Amistad rebellion extended the biographical reach of the course across the Atlantic. Thanks to Richard S. Newman, students found Bishop Richard Allen’s life as a “Black Founding Father” compelling. Weighing Abraham Lincoln’s role in emancipation consistently provides a provocative climax.
I should pause here to point out that no matter where the students come from, except for Lincoln, Tubman, and perhaps Douglass, these men and women are almost entirely new to them, a headshot and a sentence in a high school history textbook not counting for much. Thus, while there are many other ways to organize a course on abolishing slavery in the U.S.—economics, political structure, ideological development—using personal narratives to get at larger structures has distinct advantages. Not only does biography make abolitionism accessible, this genre also emphasizes how people go about making choices to resist, denounce, and organize against injustice. The final essay about the present then becomes a logical but not over-determined outgrowth of the history we have just finished studying.
Still, to enliven this distant world of texts—and make the connection to our own–human resources can help. Each time I have taught the course, we have taken a voluntary field trip to Conner Prairie, Indiana’s marvelous living history park, for the “Follow the North Star” program. For an intense hour, participants inhabit the roles of fugitives treading the knife’s edge between the underground railroad and re-enslavement.
The best classroom debate could never replicate this poignantly designed experience. One year, I began the course with the DeWolf family, not only screening the documentary Traces of the Trade about a white family coming to grips with the legacy of their slave-trading forebears, but also inviting into the classroom Thomas DeWolf, one of the participants in the film and author of his own memoir. The most recent time I taught the course, local folk music legend and retired math teacher Mike Van Rensselaer held my class spellbound playing classics from the abolitionist songbook on the banjo and guitar. And in 2012, Historians Against Slavery founder James Brewer Stewart graciously discussed his biography of William Lloyd Garrison with the class. Embodying the historic struggle against slavery through guests and field trips enhances the prospect of bridging then and now.
Finally, in the closing week of the semester, we jump from the nineteenth to the twenty-first century by reading arresting accounts of human trafficking around the world. I have featured a different book each time: Kevin Bales, Disposable People: New Slavery in the Global Economy; Kevin Bales and Zoe Trodd’s edited volume, To Plead Our Own Cause: Personal Stories by Today’s Slaves; and David Batstone, Not for Sale: The Return of the Global Slave Trade–And How We Can Fight It. These books have different strengths as teaching tools. Bales surveys the world with a combination of scholarly and journalistic acumen; Batstone functions as a latter-day abolitionist tract, as he portrays the heroic work of contemporary antislavery activists. But I found the Bales and Trodd collection of autobiographical accounts to be the best fit, dovetailing particularly well with the biographical theme of the course. Like the slave narratives of an earlier era, these accounts beckon to the reader’s moral imagination.
Still, the distance is unsettling. To go from the Civil War Amendments to children prostituted in Thailand and brick kiln laborers in the thralls of debt bondage in India, or to migrant laborers in Florida and housekeepers in Washington, D.C., does feel jarring. But I would argue that for students, history is always thus—an intimidating leap from then to now. No matter where one ends the nineteenth-century abolitionists’ story, from the Emancipation Proclamation to the unraveling of Reconstruction into Jim Crow, the light switch of the present must get flipped. My hope is that rather than feel frozen in their tracks by the horrors of the contemporary world, students will find the abolitionist footsteps they wish to follow.