IN DEFENSE OF NEWSPAPERS -- ANOTHER RESPONSE!

IN DEFENSE OF NEWSPAPERS – ANOTHER RESPONSE!

James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D.
© August 30, 2010

REFERENCE:

This little missive has generated quite a response. I cannot acknowledge much less publish all of your comments, but I can share with you a representative sample of them. I am most pleased that I am hearing from contemporaries who shared similar experiences to mine, and have had the temerity to share thoughts. Here is one.

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READER NO. 1 WRITES:

Jim,

I always enjoy your musings on different subjects, most of which I am interested in. My early mornings are taken up about like yours, reading sports and editorials first, though at about 7 AM not 5. I'd like to ask you a couple questions:

QUESTION NO. ONE:

Isn't it a little easier for Germany and England to attack their recession than it is ours, because their countries are smaller, and their political systems a little more controllable?

I wonder if we haven't let our country get so far out of control, so messed up and broken, with outgo growing and income not, that we are in a difficult position to correct.

QUESTION NO. TWO:

Although you grew up as I did in a town with few blacks, I'm sure you have lived where the situation is different and have seen the problems. There again, I wonder how we can correct it.

I live in South Carolina (40% black, mostly poor). We have handled the racial situation in schools and society poorly. We dumb down our public schools to suit the mores of the blacks and pacify them.

Graduation rates are terrible, as our job opportunities.

Our factory jobs that employed high school graduates have moved and mostly only higher tech and automotive jobs requiring tech ed or college are available, increasing the problems of welfare, unemployment, lack of motivation, and increased crime.

Both whites and blacks are tired of it and blame each other.

Now, undocumented Mexicans are getting to be an increasing problem making a bad problem: employment, health care, education, welfare, crime and public cost worse.

It seems to me the politicians at all levels blame each other, and on both sides spend much money to get elected, as you pointed out, and for which they owe favors, then start on getting reelected, yet the problems are never solved.

We need more income and yet everyone wants lower taxes,

With our constitution and government and the lack of statesmen (everything is more money, more power), I question how we can straighten out our problem.

I think Congress should be reorganized, take away retirement and benefits, and have term limits, limit or eliminate lobbyists. But how would we get Congress to vote against itself?

I think we need to quit fighting no win, wasteful wars, bring our troops home, not have the military dictate our budget, overhaul our welfare system, maybe localize it with rules.

Another problem is that without regulation, too much money is wasted, and with it we just have wasteful bureaucracy. Is there a solution that you see? What?

Dick

* * *

DR. FISHER RESPONDS:

Dick,

Thank you for your thoughtful email. As you know, I am an organizational-industrial psychologist with most of my career spent in organizational development (OD) psychology, although I initially worked as a chemist in the lab and chemical engineer in the field. That work took me to South America, Europe and South Africa, as well as the Middle East.

* * *

Since economics is mainly about behavior, and since my career has been behavior-intensive, I will attempt to share some of my observations here with only the certainty of my views the perspective of a single individual, who like you, grew up in farm country in the middle of the United States with a certain value and belief system.

* * *

QUESTION NO. ONE: ECONOMICS OF SCALE

It is true Great Britain and Germany are smaller economic systems than the United States, but being smaller does not relegate them to having less difficulty when economic collapse hits them from across the Atlantic with the real estate meltdown and the crash on Wall Street.

Germany has the largest economy in Europe and the European Economic Community (EEC) is larger than that of the United States. Put another way, what happens in one part of Europe affects all the other nations in the EEC. And what happens in the United States not only has a ripple affect on the EEC but the nations of South East Asia including China, Japan and India.

Given this intertwined interdependence, chaos and order are fluctuating currents that can produce economic tsunamis.

Take wheat production, for example.

Due to forest fires in Russia, that country lost one-third of its wheat crop that would have been exported. Russia is exporting no wheat in 2010. Speculators in wheat futures are literally making hey. Speculation has increased several hundred folds in recent years. This drives up the price of wheat at the first blush of panic.

In many Third World countries, more than two billion souls make no more than $2 a day with 70 percent of that income going for food.

Starvation is a likely possibility if suitable reserves have not been set-aside at a reasonable cost. The current picture could not be bleaker for them.

Meanwhile, wheat farmers in Kansas are going to feel as if they have won the lottery.

It is hard to be philosophical about this problem.

* * *

QUESTION NO. ONE: CULTURE AND STRUCTURE AND FUNCTION

When I was working in Europe and living in Brussels, Belgium in the 1980s, I brought no furniture with me over than a bed and some books along with Beautiful Betty and Jennifer.

I look around my study here today and see the solid office furniture I bought there, which was largely German, and a smile crosses my face.

Not only was the furniture solid and serviceable but also the German manufacturers provided extra pieces in anticipation I would lose something or in the process of putting it together break something.

The German culture prides itself in making things. That is the structure and function of work. It translates into people across the world wanting things made by Germans.

* * *

The American sociologist Vance Packard wrote two compelling books that describe the American propensity for buying things.

Americans have a consumers' attitude towards things. Packard calls this in THE WASTE MAKERS (1960) the obsolescence of desirability and the obsolescence of function.

Americans, he says, are obsessed with always having something new. Obsolescence, then, is a planned conspiracy between producers and consumers.

Earlier, he wrote THE HIDDEN PERSUADERS (1957), which was the practice of using subliminal stimulation in advertisements and television commercials that energized consumers to want what they didn't need and to buy it now.

* * *

Our country is not out-of-control. It is marching to its typical drummer. The problem now is that the world has caught up with us and we are a luxury we can no longer afford.

Even the economic crisis of 2008 is unlikely to neither break this spell nor change the structure and function of our desire.

* * *

We are a nation of spoiled brats. You and I may not be able to identify with this attribution because we came along when struggle and hard work were all we knew. Our world is history to baby boomers and the children of baby boomers.

FDR gave us the Social Security System. Hard working people, who have managed to stay employed and have shared the expense of Social Security with their employer, now derive some benefits.

That is not likely to be the case for the children of baby boomers. That is sad for at least two reasons. One, Social Security has been a safety net for ordinary people; and two, the extravagance of young people today are unlikely to know what hit them fifty years from now.

* * *

We are a bankrupt nation living off of European and China success not to mention many South American countries as well. When we get into difficulty, we print more money. You can do that only as long as your bankers, these nations holding our notes, have a sense of humor about the United States of America.

This launches me into your second question.

* * *

QUESTION NO. TWO – IT IS NOT OUR PROBLEM!

Like you, I never grew up around Negroes as they were called in our day, but I did know a few.

We had less than 300 in a town of 33,000, and they were mostly confined to a two-block area near the courthouse. I never had a Negro in a single class in high school, but played football with one, Edward Thompson, who was one heck of a football player. I also played baseball as a fourteen-year-old with Leroy Watts in the Industrial Baseball League. He graduated from high school when I was in the seventh grade. I knew Negroes who were baseball players far better than I was that had no opportunity to play with our American Legion Team.

We lived in the north, Dick, but in as much a segregated environment as any Negro from Alabama.

* * *

In my long life, it has never changed. When economic circumstances get tight or someone drops the ball, we have an easy target, blacks, and now Mexicans to gang up on.

Recently, I had a new bathroom put in my study, a work project to my amazement that took nine days. The principle worker on that project was a Mexican, named Rosendo. I’ve never met a harder workingman, or a more polite and dignified human being. He struggled with his English but was patient with me when I asked questions. I am a demanding employer as BB would be quick to acknowledge.

A young man who drove up in a new BMW, and hardly did anything yet I learned he was not the supervisor but a fellow worker. BB who has employed this firm at her work said that Rosendo most likely makes the minimum wage. I doubt seriously if that is the case of the beamer owner.

* * *

The hysteria about blacks and undocumented workers is a problem here in Florida as well as a hot campaign issue. I see Mexicans working in my neighborhood all the time when I walk, cutting down trees, doing lawns, roofing, painting houses, and doing construction. It is hot here year around and I’ve never seen them complaining. They are always polite and seriously engaged.

We don’t have an energy policy or an immigration policy. We go from election to election with the promise of such policies but they never materialize. They are simply campaign fodder.

Congressmen are elected every two years, and yet incumbents win more than 90 percent of the time. So, I don’t think the answer is the system, but our apathy when it comes to voting. Less than 20 percent turned out in Florida for the mid-term elections for party nominees for the Democrats and Republicans. Whose fault is that? We get the representation we deserve, and it will always remain so until we change our ways.

* * *

When you and I came into the world in Clinton, Iowa during the Great Depression, the Negro church was strong. Clinton had several African Christian denominations in our town. Moreover, most Negroes of our town grew up in two-parent families. This was true of Eddie Thompson and Leroy Watts. It also happened to be the norm across American society in the 1930s. What happened?

A book that has helped me understand the problem of race in America is Shelby Steele’s THE CONTENT OF OUR CHARACTER: A NEW VISION OF RACE IN AMERICA (1991).

Steele takes an introspective view of his race based on his own experience. He is critical of affirmative action as he sees it weaken blacks and their resolve. He sees the welfare system another trap of blacks in dependence in perpetuity.

Steele is an angry man and doesn’t pull any of his punches. Whites read him but he is largely ignored by his own race. Yet, he still blames whites for limiting opportunities for blacks.

* * *

QUESTION TWO: IS THERE A SOLUTION?

Optimism breed’s eternal.

We are an optimistic people but a country disinclined to make the deep calculations to resolve the many issues you site: wasteful wars, a dysfunctional welfare system, a wasteful bureaucracy, and general apathy.

We react to crises rather than anticipate them. During our entire unique and remarkable history, we have been dependent on our resilience to lift us out of our greatest stupidities, and to date we have managed to land on our feet. How about tomorrow?

Alas, we are looking for solutions when we have no consensus on what are the problems. Our discussion here has been on symptoms. Causes are too ugly to consider.

Fairness and equal opportunity in freedom is one thing. Embracing such requirements is quite another. We all live in the safety of our character, our comfort zone, and our common ground. Operationally, we want problems that impinge on that to be solved without our involvement.

* * *

We are the minority race in America now, and in one hundred years the problems we agonize over so assiduously today will be academic tomorrow.

As I said in my last piece, we are a skin-deep culture, cosmetic, superficial, transitory, on the run, thinking the world revolves around us. Well, it doesn’t. It never has only now we can't ignore the fact.

We can blame our discomfort and anxiety on Blacks or Mexicans or some other scapegoat but that doesn’t resolve the issue. It would help if we were a truly integrated society and had friends based on common interest rather than skin color or ethnicity, but that will take time.

Meanwhile, we need to help those who cannot help themselves whatever their skin color or ethnicity to be responsible, accountable and contributors to society. It starts by accepting them as they are and ourselves as we are. The blame game serves no one.

Remarkably, should the economy suddenly turn around, and Blacks be employed as readily as Whites, the crime rate would go down, and all the other disparaging preoccupations that have been alluded to here will, temporarily, melt away.

Be always well,

Jim