Communities Replaced By Kennels

I know I have high blood pressure, but I often do things that might make it worse. For example, I attended some subcommittee meetings of the Committee to End Homelessness in King County. I knew it was bad for my circulation when a speaker, talking about a program to permanently house homeless women, said that it was policy to try and keep the women's partners away (referred to collectively as "the boyfriends") on the grounds that they're "generally" "part of the problem."

I expressed the view that each case should be carefully considered. Human relationships should not be assumed poisonous as a matter of course, I thought. Social agencies should not be so arrogant, I thought, as to suppose that they can re-engineer society by means of a reckless, blind, wholesale destruction of its existing bonds, to replace them by the forced bonds of institutions and the artificial communities that social agencies invariably try to foster. Societies are grown, not manufactured. My caseworker can never be my best friend. The institutions I am thrown into should not force me to only socialize with fellow "clients." A twelve-step program can't be my family. And not every woman who is homeless is homeless because SHE has "a problem."

I tried to express these thoughts in the meeting, at which about 20 representatives of King County social service agencies were in attendance, and not one of them openly agreed with me during the meeting, although a few looked concerned that I might explode and soil their suits with my brains. I stopped going to those meetings about then, and I am quite pleased to report that, soon after, I stopped needing beta-blockers to keep my blood pressure down. So, there was good in the world, for a time.

But the nihilistic, life-rejecting, attitude that was in evidence at that meeting is still all around me, and I may have to take up the atenolol again.

Take the recent school closures. Apparently the idea is that one school is as good as any other. Hey, let's close ALL the existing schools and open up one great big one in a warehouse in SODO! A school's a school!

With all the money we could save by having only one Seattle school, we could pay the projected annual costs for the proposed Seattle municipal jail. Here's another cool idea: We could build the new jail for misdemeanants directly across the street from the one big school, and use part of it to house the kids when they're not in school. There would be no more arguments about who would have to bus to school!

After all, parents and families are part of the problem. Their insistence that "their" children stay with them prevents the city from establishing a convenient citizenry. The kids don't need the parents they have, and they would be far better off with the parents the city assigns them.

In fact, we can contract out the jobs of parenting to the same companies that will supply the new jail with its guards and managers. There isn't much difference between a jailer and a parent anyway, except that a jailer is a professional. One inadvertent advantage of the arrangement would be that when our kids grow up and become the outcasts of our society that we plan them to be, they will feel right at home in the Seattle jail. Because they WILL be home!

Assume the worst of human beings, plan for it, and thereby make it happen. Destroy human bonds and watch the inevitable result, namely a substitution of those bonds by vapid, sterile, institutional arrangements that are only communities in the sense that kennels are. Then, when everyone is reduced to the level of domestic dogs, you can say their dependence proves they needed you, and they needed the collars you thoughtfully provided them, and they needed their leashes. Convince even them, and they'll love you, lick your boots, and swear life itself was "the problem."

It’s the minorities, Isn’t It?

Here’s your Intermittent Science and Technology News You Can Use Catch-Up Roundup.

Our first item is news that the “Radar Scope” you ordered when you were a pubescent middle school boy will soon be available at the low low price of $1000 per unit. To be initially distributed in the spring only to our troops in Iraq, it will detect signs of unwanted enemy breathing on the other side of thick concrete walls. The hand-held devices should be ready for peeking into girls’ locker rooms as early as 2008. In the meantime expect it to be on your local police department’s Home Security 2006 Christmas Wish List. That’s News You Can Use!

Our remaining items belong to the “Social Science Marches On” category. A study of the Canadian Medical Association has concluded that giving homeless alcoholics up to 16 glasses of wine a day on an hourly basis can improve their health and behavior. In related news, alcoholics everywhere are saying, “we told you so,” and “what part of ‘self-medication’ hadn’t you understood?” Here’s a general rule to live by: when desperate people living desperate lives say they need something, they may know more about it than the comfortably ignorant.

Of course the free wine helps in part by relieving the need to waste valuable energy scrounging for wine in other ways. It also helps create a bond between the wine providers and the wine receivers, which makes the wine receivers more accepting of other services.

Not all social bonds are good, however. A sociologist at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee has determined that the cell phone has brought too much social connection to modern life and is now increasingly a factor in domestic strife. Family life is being interrupted by work life; work life is being interrupted by family life. So the social bonding that helps an alcoholic accept help to get off the streets can also break up families, when there’s too much of it, and put moms and dads on the streets. We are complicated animals, aren’t we?

How complicated are we? Scientists are looking into it! Socio-evolutionary-anthropological scientists have been theorizing about the very evolution of the mechanism of social bonding that we all take for granted. How have we humans successfully evolved the means to bond outside of families, to create the friendships and comraderies that tie us one-to-another and keep us from killing each other all the time, instead of only just some of the time?

The answer is truly complicated. Nature, these researchers say, has endowed some of us with “imagination” that we use to modify our own behavior for the purpose of creating bonds. Examples of this can especially be seen at Star Trek Conventions, and among Goths, Raging Grannies, Filkers, and Canasta players. The imaginative people bond by sharing the products of their imaginations and through their enhanced facilities of suggestibility and geeking.

But the genius of social evolution is that every one of its successes creates more opportunity. As imagination evolved to bring some people together, those who lacked that advantage evolved mechanisms to compensate. Hence, the unimaginative have learned to bond together in what researchers refer to as “clumps” defined by shared boredom and the shared paraphernalia of stupidity, such as alcohol, reality TV, and designer jeans.

Further Questions and Activities.

1. List ten ways a device to see through walls could improve lives. Next, list ten ways the invention of walls has already improved lives. Combine your lists. See them negate each other.

2. Get a kitchen timer. Set it for one hour. Before it goes off make up six conclusions for future scientific sociological studies to have.

3. Here’s an experiment to try with the whole class. Use your imagination to try to bond with the student on your right. When the student on your left tries to bond with you, report him. When it’s over, who’s in detention? It’s the minorities, isn’t it?

Nonconsensual Induced Retching Is Wrong

This probably won't be one of my cheerful columns, because the last few days I have been preoccupied with varieties of violence. It just seems like everywhere I look someone is engaging in some sort of violence. Sometimes it's physical and obvious like the wars in the middle and not so middle easts. Or you've got stupid mailbox bombing violence. Other times it's psychological and social violence right around here.

The funniest example of the latter appeared in Saturday's Times in the, erk, Dilly Dally Alley.

Come to think of it, right there, calling the comics pages the Dilly Dally Alley -- there's some psychosocial violence in that, isn't there? When did that start? What were they thinking? It's like those silly names some restaurants give to menu items so you can't order anything without sounding stupid. "We'd like one Dilly Willy Burger and two Dally Pally Patty Melty Welties. Oh, and Alley-Size those please." Inducing retching is a form of violence that doesn't get all the attention it deserves.

OK, but that wasn't what annoyed me Saturday. What annoyed me Saturday was the "guest" strip, Lola.

As best as I can tell, Lola is meant to be an endearingly crotchety woman of advanced years, who goes around saying endearingly crotchety things that are meant to be amusing. I don't know, I don't usually read it, but Saturday's strip caught my attention because of the appearance of a homeless stereotype, a bench-sitting bearded knit-cap-wearing shopping-cart-near-by guy, "Carl."

Lovable Lola establishes her inherent goodness at once by asking Carl if he is ready to go to church. Carl says, "Can't -- I've got a hangover," thereby rounding out the constellation of the stereotype and providing that hook that every good strip needs, making us want to read more.

In the next panel, Lola sets up the gag by saying, "You're becoming like family, Carl..." The figures are inked over to encourage the reader to hurry on to the zinger. And there it is in the last panel: Lola turns her back to Carl, and says, "I know, because sometimes I feel like smacking you."

Ha, ha! She meant THAT kind of family. She meant the kind of family where she is the one in power and she gets to hit the other members of the family and get away with it. Isn't that hilarious?

No, it isn't. It also isn't hilarious to suggest that an appropriate way to draw an alcoholic homeless man into mainstream community is to threaten him with violence if he doesn't go to your church with you.

An even subtler kind of violence has been becoming popular in, of all places, Seattle's social service workers and those connected with them. Some of the people who are in favor of proposed changes to the Noel House mission are resorting to a rhetoric that includes specifically attacking the idea of a homeless community.

Ordinarily, attacking an idea is not what I would call an act of violence.

But the idea under attack in this case is the idea that the people who are most affected by the proposed changes form a people at all. By destroying this idea, supporters of the Noel House changes would forever deny the homeless women who live at Noel House or any other homeless any right ever to speak on their own behalf.

If there is no community then there is no voice. If there is no voice, then you might as well have clipped tongues. Stealing people's voice is always an act of violence.