Zuckerberg: Kill Facebook Live

The advent of Facebook Live struck me as odd – and unnecessary. Now it strikes me as irresponsible. In the past year there have been disturbing instances of violence broadcast live on this feature, the most recent being a Thai man who strangled his infant and shot himself. Does anyone want to see this? If you do, I’d rather not meet you.

Human nature has its fair share of perversity, I realize. Graphic porn and violence, gory first person shooter video games, sadomasochism, strange obsessions and fetishes. Even mainstream network television has gotten extreme. One of my favorite escapist TV shows, Scandal, for example, has featured so much on screen torture that I am fairly close to ditching the series.

But the live feature on Facebook seems to be inspiring violent and disturbed individuals to broadcast heinous acts for the world to see. While I would not go so far as to say the existence of Facebook Live causes these violent acts, I do think there is an exhibitionist quality to much of our current internet activity.

I personally have resisted watching any of the publicized incidents of Facebook Live violence because I think it’s bad for our minds and souls to witness such things – especially to see them over and over until we are numb to acts that should distress us greatly. And I think that is a sufficient reason to shut down this misguided feature of social media.

After the 2016 presidential election and the proliferation of fake news, Mark Zuckerberg pledged to find ways of ferreting out misinformation. I would call upon his leadership now to get ride of Facebook Live. Any potential positive aspects of live broadcasting on Facebook (although I fail to see what they might be) are outweighed by the harm of the graphic live violence that is becoming too frequent.

Instead of watching or broadcasting on Facebook Live, let’s turn to our families or get out and engage with people face to face. That’s called Life.

 

 

 

Unfriendly Skies

In the latest episode of Sky Wars, an American Airlines flight attendant got belligerent with the mother of a toddler, wresting a stroller away from the woman and hitting her child in the process. This incident follows on the heels of the disgraceful United Airlines debacle, wherein a paying customer was seriously injured while being dragged off a plane. These days, the fear of a terrorist commandeering an aircraft has been dwarfed by  fear of the very airline employees who are supposed to keep us safe.

To be fair, being a flight attendant has become one of the less glamorous jobs in the world. In ever more cramped quarters, these airline personnel are expected to see to the needs of about 200 travelers, all the while making sure everyone is safe. And in fact, most altercations on airplanes are between passengers, not between customers and crew. So add to the flight attendant job description the need to be airplane referee, cabin librarian shushing loud passengers, and ersatz bartender cutting off belligerent drunks.

Air travel used to be a glamorous luxury. Passengers would be treated to full meals served by smartly dressed flight attendants in roomy airplane cabins. Travelers never felt the need to board a plane with more than a briefcase or handbag in tow. Unfortunately, this more civilized travel experience was costly, and few normal people could afford to fly.

As airlines stepped up the competition, ticket prices came down and inconveniences went up. Many of the formerly complimentary perks of flying have been removed. Now most airlines charge for checked bags and in-flight entertainment, for instance. And meal service for anyone not traveling in first class is nonexistent. Meanwhile, in desperate measures to cut costs, airlines keep squeezing in more seats, leaving less aisle space and leg room for already disgruntled passengers.

All of this is a recipe for disaster. With more passengers per square inch and everyone dragging aboard roller bags to avoid baggage fees, the potential for conflict and flight attendant fatigue has gone way up. On a recent flight, I witnessed a passenger holding up the boarding process for a good 20 minutes as he stood in the aisle trying to find space in the overhead bins for his oversized bag – all the while manhandling other passengers’ luggage and generally causing a ruckus. The Southwest flight attendants deserve awards for patience in dealing with this guy in a courteous and helpful manner.

The other reason for short tempers on the part of passengers is that, prior to boarding,  they have just suffered the hassle and indignity of having themselves and their possessions searched by TSA agents in this post-9/11 world. I myself have had my hands test positive for gun or explosives residue and been physically searched and manhandled at security. Whenever my husband gets a pat down, the TSA agent asks him if there are any sensitive parts on his body. He always answers, “Just my genitals.” The agent never finds that amusing.

The litany of travel woes in the world of flying is long: endless lines at security, tiny and cramped airplane cabins, overbooking situations, passengers eating smelly foods brought from home, minuscule airplane bathrooms that smell like the sewage plant, all manner of animals on board, babies crying, passengers watching shows on their laptops at deafening volumes, surly airline personnel.

Still, a method of transportation that can get an American from one coast to the other in less than 6 hours is nothing to sneeze at. It sure beats a tedious train trip or crowded bus ride – or a cross country family car trip with incessant potty stops and whining, “Are we there yet?”

Young Women Need Feminism

Kathrine Switzer made history in 1967 when she participated as a registered runner in the Boston Marathon. Despite rules barring women from competing, Switzer signed up and managed to run the entire marathon, despite an official physically trying to drag her out of the race. Fifty years later, Switzer jubilantly ran in this year’s Boston Marathon, leading a group of 100 women runners.

After the race, Switzer was quoted as saying,  “If young women today take for granted the fact that they can compete like men in the sport of running, that’s fantastic. That’s what we wanted when we began working for acceptance.” (amightygirl.com) I’m not so sure I agree with her.

I think it’s a problem that young women today don’t realize how many rights women gained only through the activism and struggle of their forebears. It has been less than 100 years since women won the right to vote in America. Even in more recent history, women were discriminated against in the workplace and barred from many rights that today’s woman takes for granted.

In the 1960s, for instance, women could be refused a credit card, and married women had to have their husbands co-sign to obtain one. Married women were also listed on passports as simply the wife of a man. Most of the Ivy League schools barred women from admittance until the late Sixties and beyond. And only married women with menstrual difficulties were allowed to purchase contraception in the early Sixties.

Even as women began entering the workplace in greater numbers, they faced widespread harassment and discrimination. In the 1960s, women earned approximately 60% of what men earned, largely due to the occupations that were open to women, but also because men were looked at as the breadwinners and therefore in need of greater compensation. This was quite overt, as evidenced in the comedy The Mary Tyler Moore Show, in which Mary’s boss quite clearly states that she is being paid less because she is a woman.

Aside from salary issues, women were subject to sexist and discriminatory policies at work. For example, a woman could be fired because she became pregnant. Flight attendants in the 60s (called “stewardesses”) were subject to height, weight, and attractiveness qualifications. And stewardesses could be fired for getting married. After all, the predominantly male clientele on flights wanted unrestricted access to attractive single women whom they could sexually harass with abandon.

This week Fox News icon Bill O’Reilly was forced to resign under allegations of sexual harassment, following his old boss, Roger Ailes, who also left the media giant amid such accusations.

Back when I was a young working college student, there was no such concept as “sexual harassment.” Women were routinely subjected to unwanted comments and advances from co-workers. I remember being forced to kiss my boss – on the lips! – on my last day of work at an insurance agency. There was no recourse available to women until Gloria Steinem’s exposé of the Playboy enterprise brought to light the rampant victimization of women in the workplace.

Today many of the rights women take for granted are imperiled by a conservative movement that wants to relegate women to their past restrictive roles as wives and mothers. Particularly in the area of reproductive rights, legislation is intruding upon the rights of women to obtain contraception and other medical care of their choosing. And as indicated by many recent high profile instances of sexual harassment and domestic violence, as well as the current pay gap of 20% between men and women (aauw.org), women still need to fight for our rights, not take them for granted.

Many young women today dislike the term “feminism,” seeing it as a pejorative term for a ball-busting hater of men. What they need to realize is that without feminism, they would not be enjoying the freedoms and rights they enjoy today. And without continued feminism, those rights may slip away in the future.

Deja Vu

Americans had our comeuppance when we ridiculed the Brits for their foolish vote on Brexit. After the UK decided to break from the European Union, many Britons had  “voter’s remorse.” Many didn’t really understand what they were voting for. It seemed a travesty – until November 8, 2016. On that day, many of us had to eat crow when we realized our nation had just elected an unstable, egotistical game show host as President of the United States.

Now the French are having their turn in the spotlight with a presidential election, and it feels to me like a bad case of deja vu. There are so many parallels between the 2016 American election and the upcoming contest in France.

As in America, there is no incumbent running for president. The two likely contenders are Marine Le Pen of the far right National Front party and Emmanuel Macron, a centrist “insider,” while in the wings there is a Bernie Sanders-like figure in Jean-Luc Melenchon, a leftist with rabid followers who likely will refuse to vote for the more centrist Macron, leaving Le Pen’s unlikely candidacy to imitate that of Donald Trump, the xenophobic outsider who wants to make their country great again.

The nationalist, anti-immigrant stance of Le Pen is similar to that of Trump’s. Like Trump, Le Pen is capitalizing on the sentiment that immigrants (mostly Muslim) are taking resources from hard-working Frenchmen, causing violence, and creating a clash of cultures. Her refusal to cover her head in a meeting with Lebanon’s highest religious leader solidified her support with the far right. She has also denied France’s complicity in sending thousands of Jews to their deaths during World War II.

Also as in the U.S. election, Russia is meddling with the French election. For example, Russian website Sputnik spread rumors that Le Pen’s likely opponent, Macron, is gay.  Le Pen, for her part, paints Macron as a part of “the system” and vilifies his opinion that globalization is actually a good thing.

The white nationalist movement is growing in Europe, due in part to the refugee crisis and in part to the economic uncertainty of a rapidly changing, interdependent world. Leaders like Trump and Le Pen appeal to a “me first” mentality that causes people to hark back to an imagined simpler time when they and their country were considered strong and great.

Unfortunately, the isolationist tendency to retreat from the European Union and from trade treaties, to crack down on minorities and immigrants, and to scapegoat those who don’t fit a sanitized cultural mold won’t make our countries safer. Rather, such nationalism will create greater polarization, inequality, and radicalization, all of which will serve to destabilize our great democracies.

I hope France does not succumb to the politics of division and hate. But I am not optimistic. After all, this is a country whose cultural hero used to be Jerry Lewis.

Religious Persecutors

I recently watched the film Patriot Days, which tells the story of the Boston Marathon bombings. It details the lives of some of the victims as well as the bombers themselves and the law enforcement officials who apprehended them.

Tamerlan Tsarnaev, like many fanatics, used religion to justify the murder and maiming of innocent men, women, and children. His brother Dzhokhar, who seems less ideologically driven, does not come off any better in the film, showing a selfishness and callous disregard for human life. He even ran over his own brother with a car in his haste to save himself. Tamerlan is dead, and Dzhokhar languishes in prison while lawyers appeal his death sentence for the bombings and the shooting death of an MIT campus police officer.

Today is Good Friday, and Christians all over the world commemorate the suffering and death of Jesus Christ at the hands of the Romans but at the behest of religious leaders who saw Jesus as a threat to their power. These leaders used trumped up charges of blasphemy to justify handing over an innocent man to be crucified, a cruel and ignominious form of execution.

Although the larger story of Christ’s passion and death points to his resurrection and the salvation of the world, the actions of the chief priests and Pharisees of Jesus’s time are echoed in history’s many instances of people using religion to justify violence.

The world is filled with many faith traditions, each with its own beliefs, rituals, and customs. People of faith may disagree with and even criticize each other. But our religious beliefs should never be the basis for hatred or killing.

As Jesus neared his death, he prayed, “Forgive them, Father, for they know not what they do.” If Jesus can forgive his tormentors, we too should seek to promote peace and healing, not violence and death.

Proportional Response

Politicians on both sides of the aisle are praising President Trump’s decision to bomb an airfield in Syria in retaliation for Assad’s recent use of chemical weapons against his own people. The air strike is being called a “proportional response” to the egregious attack on the part of the Assad regime. If anything, it’s significantly less heinous than the wholesale massacre of innocent civilians using a slow and painful method of murder.

While I’m not sure I join the pundits in praising this recent U.S. military action, it has gotten me to thinking about the idea of proportional response. This idea goes back to Biblical times, wherein Jewish law specified the so-called “eye for an eye” administration of justice. What many people don’t realize is that this law was not meant to incite violence but rather to contain it. Therefore, if someone took an eye from you, you were allowed only to go so far as to take an eye from him, not to kill him or his whole family.

In recent history, America has seen a decrease in tolerance for proportional response. Take, for instance, the recent assault on an innocent United Airlines passenger who refused to give up his paid for seat on a flight. Instead of trying to coax the man off the plane, flight attendants called the police to board the plane and forcibly remove him. He was yanked out of his seat, made bloody as his face was banged against the handset, and literally dragged on the floor out of the plane. The entire incident was caught, of course, on cell phone video and has been broadcast all over television and the internet. One would think United – and those officers – would know better.

Yet even with the installation of body cameras on police officers, incidences of  police abuse seem to be increasing. Routine traffic stops and minor infractions, such as illegally selling cigarettes on the street, are met with disproportional and sometimes deadly force. Why?

Certainly there has been a racial component to many instances of police overkill (literally, in the case of Laquan McDonald, who was shot 16 times). But whether dealing with individual suspects, performing house raids in the war on drugs, or even responding to street protests, the police have become increasingly militarized – using armored vehicles, assault weapons and grenades, and often going in guns blazing to deal with ordinary criminals. For instance, a Georgia toddler was severely injured by a flash grenade in a raid on the home of a suspected drug dealer.

The war on drugs itself has been responsible for mass incarceration and the creation of career criminals who, due to Draconian “three strikes “laws, are spending most of their natural lives in prison for minor drug infractions. Meanwhile, we are witnessing an epidemic of people addicted to opioids prescribed by their own doctors. Yet Trump’s new Attorney General Jeff Sessions has shown indications that he wants to ramp up the “war on drugs” that has done so little to reduce crime, addiction, or the proliferation of weapons in our country.

I certainly believe in the right of law enforcement officers to defend themselves from armed criminals and to use SWAT teams in very dangerous, high risk situations. But the normalization of these military tactics and responses is a danger to innocent people who may be swept up in a raid or peaceful protesters who are exercising their First Amendment right to assembly. More importantly, I believe that violence begets violence, whether we are dealing with military conflicts around the world or our own citizens here at home.

Our government, our laws, our military, and our law enforcement agencies should keep in mind the concept of proportional response in dealing with transgressions. They should seek to de-escalate conflict wherever possible. Such policies would increase respect for the men and women entrusted with keeping the peace and keeping us safe.

 

 

 

 

Too Much to Dream

(The Dream, Salvador Dali)

The other night, my husband was shouting in his sleep. He sounded like a character in an action thriller. When I woke him up to calm him, he said that he’d had a nightmare, one of the few he’s ever had in his life. Throughout our marriage, my husband has insisted that he doesn’t dream, and I have insisted that everyone dreams, but he may not remember his.

Dreams are freaky glimpses into the unconscious. Over the years I’ve had scary dreams, recurring dreams, and the occasional erotic dream. In many of my dreams I have to climb or traverse a great height. Sometimes I am in an unbelievably high roller coaster that terrifies me. I also often dream about being lost or losing something I need.

It’s interesting to try to interpret what my dreams mean. For example, the online “Dream Bible” explains my fear of heights in dreams as a fear of success. In truth, though, I am just afraid of heights, so dreaming of them is probably just a reflection of that anxiety. Indeed, psychologist Patrick McNamara, PhD., states that there is no validity to most dream interpretation. In Psychology Today, McNamara claims that so-called dream interpretation is usually very subjective. He does, however, believe that one day psychology will be able to crack the codes of our dreams and find the meaning therein. (“The Folly of Dream Interpretation,” July 29, 2013)

Why we dream is also something of a mystery. There are theories that dreams are a way of restoring the mind to balance, an indication of stress or anxiety, a way of spurring creativity, or even markers for some neuro-degenerative diseases such as Parkinson’s and dementia.

The other thing that fascinates me about dreams is how normal they seem while I’m in them but incoherent when I remember them upon waking. As an example, last night I had the following dream: I was in a big city and stopped at a Walgreen’s to buy underwear for my daughter. While I was there, a man offered to sell me silver dollars, which I have actually been planning to get from the bank for an Easter egg hunt. There was no underwear in my kid’s size, so I left to find another Walgreen’s. Somehow I was transported to Minnesota, where my sisters live, and I thought I was there for my niece’s wedding, but it turned out she was actually already married and pregnant. She got angry when I said we were going to “par-tay” because she couldn’t drink. Next thing I knew I was on the sidewalk, and my husband was walking toward me with a mouth full of teeth that had fallen out. I was alarmed and then even more so as I noticed that I too was losing a few teeth. (The Dream Bible would say this indicates anxiety about getting old. No kidding!) We decided to head to the hospital, but my husband wouldn’t listen to me about which direction to take. We drove past an old nightclub called Limelight and found ourselves in a pitch dark neighborhood. Then we came upon some glamorous and glitzy part of the city I had never seen. I awoke before we ever reached our destination, which is a recurring aspect of my dreams.

Dreams remain a fascinating mystery to me. But I am convinced that they are an indispensable safety valve for the brain. When I was in college, I would pull all-nighters to cram for a test or write a paper. On those occasions, as I would finally allow my body to rest, I would start to have waking dreams, sort of hallucinations as my overtaxed brain slipped into sleep.

As for my husband, he remains convinced that he doesn’t usually dream, and that belief will probably remain until the next time I awaken him for shouting in his sleep, “I’m gonna blow your f#*!ing head off!”

 

Rooting for the Underdog

This year’s NCAA basketball tournament results were a mixed bag for fans of the underdog. While reigning women’s behemoth UConn was dethroned by Mississippi State, the perennial top seeded North Carolina Tar Heels once again won the men’s championship title.

Unless my or my husband’s alma mater is involved, I am almost always for the underdog in sports. I love to see a scrappy team without much prestige or many resources fight its way to victory. Some recent triumphs of the underdog include the 2014 Dayton Flyers upset of Ohio State and the little known University of South Florida Bulls making it all the way to the third round in the 2012 NCAA tournament.

As a perennial champion of the underdog, I am well placed living in Chicago, the home of shattered hopes and dreams. Whether it be our post-Michael Jordan Bulls or the ever-disappointing Bears, I can commiserate with my fellow Chicagoans and pray for the demise of the hated New England Patriots or Miami Heat.

Which brings me to my dilemma: how to handle the World Series champion Chicago Cubs? The “lovable losers” finally won it all, so where does that leave this fan of underdogs? As baseball season begins, the Cubs have some pretty high expectations riding on their shoulders. Record-breaking crowds watched them warm up at spring training camp in Phoenix, Arizona, last month. No doubt Wrigley Field will be sold out for every home game this season.

I must confess that last fall, when it looked as though the Cubs were going to lose the World Series to the Cleveland Indians, I consoled myself with the fact that the Indians are also underdogs who have not won a title since 1948. Notwithstanding their terribly racist logo, Chief Wahoo, I would not mind seeing the Indians get another chance at the prize this year.

Meanwhile, I can enjoy seeing the young, talented, and entertaining Cubs players display their skills at the ballpark. I will certainly root for their victory, but if they don’t make it all the way to the World Series, I will cheerfully philosophize, “Wait ’til next year!”