Mr. Blow says “Reading Books is Fundamental,” and that he enjoys social media, but there is no intellectual equivalent to allowing oneself the time and space to get lost in another person’s mind. Mr. Kristof takes a look at “Modern Family Matters” and says the next ‘neglected topic’ suggested by you loyal readers is family breakdown and the rise of single-parent households. Ms. Collins considers “The Luck of the Pontiff” and says that the man everybody loves to love is going to be greeting the American president in a matter of weeks. And we have a scandal already. Here’s Mr. Blow:
The first thing I can remember buying for myself, aside from candy, of course, was not a toy. It was a book.
It was a religious picture book about Job from the Bible, bought at Kmart.
It was on one of the rare occasions when my mother had enough money to give my brothers and me each a few dollars so that we could buy whatever we wanted.
We all made a beeline for the toy aisle, but that path led through the section of greeting cards and books. As I raced past the children’s books, they stopped me. Books to me were things most special. Magical. Ideas eternalized.
Books were the things my brothers brought home from school before I was old enough to attend, the things that engrossed them late into the night as they did their homework. They were the things my mother brought home from her evening classes, which she attended after work, to earn her degree and teaching certificate.
Books, to me, were powerful and transformational.
So there, in the greeting card section of the store, I flipped through children’s books until I found the one that I wanted, the one about Job. I thought the book fascinating in part because it was a tale of hardship, to which I could closely relate, and in part because it contained the first drawing I’d even seen of God, who in those pages was a white man with a white beard and a long robe that looked like one of my mother’s nightgowns.
I picked up the book, held it close to my chest and walked proudly to the checkout. I never made it to the toy aisle.
That was the beginning of a lifelong journey in which books would shape and change me, making me who I was to become.
We couldn’t afford many books. We had a small collection. They were kept on a homemade, rough-hewn bookcase about three feet tall with three shelves. One shelf held the encyclopedia, a gift from our uncle, books that provided my brothers and me a chance to see the world without leaving home.
The other shelves held a hodgepodge of books, most of which were giveaways my mother picked when school librarians thinned their collections at the end of the year. I read what we had and cherished the days that our class at school was allowed to go to the library — a space I approached the way most people approach religious buildings — and the days when the bookmobile came to our school from the regional library.
It is no exaggeration to say that those books saved me: from a life of poverty, stress, depression and isolation.
James Baldwin, one of the authors who most spoke to my spirit, once put it this way:
“You think your pain and your heartbreak are unprecedented in the history of the world, but then you read. It was books that taught me that the things that tormented me the most were the very things that connected me with all the people who were alive, who had ever been alive.”
That is the inimitable power of literature, to give context and meaning to the trials and triumphs of living. That is why it was particularly distressing that The Atlantic’s Jordan Weissmann pointed out Tuesday that:
“The Pew Research Center reported last week that nearly a quarter of American adults had not read a single book in the past year. As in, they hadn’t cracked a paperback, fired up a Kindle, or even hit play on an audiobook while in the car. The number of non-book-readers has nearly tripled since 1978.”
The details of the Pew report are quite interesting and somewhat counterintuitive. Among American adults, women were more likely to have read at least one book in the last 12 months than men. Blacks were more likely to have read a book than whites or Hispanics. People aged 18-29 were more likely to have read a book than those in any other age group. And there was little difference in readership among urban, suburban and rural population.
I understand that we are now inundated with information, and people’s reading habits have become fragmented to some degree by bite-size nuggets of text messages and social media, and that takes up much of the time that could otherwise be devoted to long-form reading. I get it. And I don’t take a troglodytic view of social media. I participate and enjoy it.
But reading texts is not the same as reading a text.
There is no intellectual equivalent to allowing oneself the time and space to get lost in another person’s mind, because in so doing we find ourselves.
Take it from me, the little boy walking to the Kmart checkout with the picture book pressed to his chest
Next up is Mr. Kristof:
When I asked readers for “neglected topics” that journalists should cover more in 2014, one of the suggestions was a delicate but vital topic: family breakdown and the rise of single-parent households.
This is an issue that, frustratingly, the right has hijacked and the left has been reluctant to confront. Yet it’s intimately related to poverty in our country.
“It isn’t politically correct to call attention to the effects of the increase in single women giving birth,” wrote Colton, one reader who suggested the topic. “Three important effects are the greatly increased incidence of long-term poverty, poor development outcomes and poor educational achievement among the children.”
“Our hesitancy to face the problem may result from fear of accusations of being moralists, racists, anti-woman, anti-freedom, supporting government decisions into personal decisions,” Lucinda noted.
Conservatives are, I think, correct to highlight family stability as a fundamental issue that goes to the welfare of children as much as food stamps or anything else. Children raised by a single parent are more than three times as likely to live in poverty as those raised by two parents, according to census data.
After Daniel Patrick Moynihan raised the issue in 1965 in the context of black families, he was condemned in liberal circles as intolerant if not racist. Over time, though, there has been a growing appreciation that he was ahead of his time, and as the Urban Institute notes, the percentage of white babies born to unwed mothers is now the same as it was for black babies when he sounded his alarm.
Yet if the issue is critical, it often emerges as part of a narrative that hectors the poor for their poverty. Republicans focus on “personal irresponsibility” or suggest that there’s nothing to be done about poverty until “those people” stop having kids outside of marriage.
As I see it, conservatives are right in their diagnosis that the issue is critical in addressing poverty, but they are wrong in their prescriptions, while liberals are often too politically correct to address the issue at all.
First, the backdrop. At last count in the United States, almost 36 percent of births were to unmarried women, according to census data. The birthrate for unmarried women is up 80 percent since 1980.
Furthermore, census data show that a majority of high school dropouts having babies are unmarried; only 9 percent of college graduates are. Two-thirds of black women giving birth are unmarried; just over a quarter of white women are.
Of course, what matters isn’t whether the parents have a marriage certificate but whether they are partners who are both committed to raising children they want and love. An Australian study found gay parenting had better outcomes on average, apparently because gay couples don’t have kids by accident.
Conservatives blame war-on-poverty welfare programs for undermining marriage. Academic studies indicate that this effect, while real, is small. The percentage of births to single mothers has been rising steadily in the United States (and other countries) since the 1940s.
Republicans tried “marriage promotion” initiatives during the administration of George W. Bush, and these are worth testing, but, so far, they have failed the litmus test. They didn’t work. However, there are several steps that we could take:
■ First is to expand family planning so that teenagers and young adults don’t have babies they don’t want and are ill-prepared to care for. Four out of five teenage pregnancies are unintended, according to the Guttmacher Institute. It’s promising that a randomized trial found that the Carrera pregnancy prevention curriculum in low-income schools reduced teen births by half. Family-planning initiatives save taxpayer money now spent on health care and the safety net, yet, after inflation, America’s investment in Title X family planning has fallen some 70 percent since 1980. That’s crazy.
■ Second is to end America’s disastrous experiment in mass incarceration. We quintupled incarceration rates since the 1970s, according to the Pew Center on the States, and, thus condemned millions of men — often men of color or with low incomes — to life at the margins and made them much less attractive as husbands. If the family has broken down, we helped break it.
■ Third is to back outreach efforts and job programs that give young people a lift and a stake in the future. Programs like Nurse-Family Partnership that work with low-income mothers have a proven track record of keeping families together. Likewise, an evaluation found that of young mothers in an Illinois outreach effort called Options for Youth, 97 percent delayed a subsequent pregnancy.
Talk about personal responsibility! It’s irresponsible on our part to fail to take these steps.
So, readers, thanks for raising this issue. And let’s address it not with platitudes but with proven policies that don’t just hail the family but also strengthen it.
Last but not least we have Ms. Collins:
President Obama is going to visit the pope! He’s been to the Vatican before, but not with this pope, who is perhaps the only person in the world almost everybody likes.
Except Rush Limbaugh, which sort of makes it even better.
The president’s visit, which is scheduled for March, comes at an interesting intersection in the two men’s careers. Pope Francis can currently do no wrong, and Barack Obama can do no right. Recently, his administration decided to move its Vatican Embassy into a more secure building, and the outcry was so intense that you’d think Obama had ordered a re-creation of the Sack of Rome.
“A slap in the face to the 78 million Catholics in the United States,” one congressman screeched.
“Why would our president close our Embassy to the Vatican?” twittered Jeb Bush. “Hopefully, it is not retribution for Catholic organizations opposing Obamacare.”
As political tweets go, this is a keeper on two counts. First, we can once again marvel at Republican politicians’ ability to insert the Affordable Care Act into everything. (Coming soon: How the individual mandate robbed Oprah Winfrey of an Oscar nomination.)
Second, we can mark the official end of the former governor of Florida’s career as the safe, sane fallback option in 2016.
But about the Vatican Embassy: the State Department has been trying to move it into a compound that includes the American Embassy to Italy. This will save money and improve security. Instantly, certain parties detected a plot.
Two former ambassadors to the Vatican, Ray Flynn (Clinton) and Jim Nicholson (Bush), penned a blistering op-ed for The Wall Street Journal in which they called the move “a colossal mistake” that would squish the Holy See’s separate identity. Diplomatically, they attributed more intense feelings to others. (“… many have seen the move as a deliberate slap at the Catholic Church and the pope; some may even detect veiled anti-Catholicism.”)
Fast-forward to many variations on the headline “Obama Insults Catholics.” The State Department pointed out that the new quarters would be in an entirely different building, with an entirely different entrance than the Italian Embassy. And that while the new embassy will not be in the Vatican, neither is the current one. Or that of any other country. The Vatican is only two-tenths of a square mile, and more than half of that is gardens.
“In fact, our new location is a tenth of a mile closer,” said Under Secretary of State Patrick Kennedy.
“It’s a clear diminishment of the importance of the Holy See post,” said Nicholson.
Cynics might wonder why we have an embassy for the Vatican in the first place. The total population is about 800 people, which is approximately one-eighth the seating capacity of Radio City Music Hall. It has virtually none of the attributes you find in an actual country. It doesn’t even have a cuisine.
But, obviously, nobody is going to disrespect the Vatican while Pope Francis is around. He won the world’s heart by quickly doing a few things that were so obvious, it’s amazing no previous pontiff figured them out. Such as: if you are going to talk about the poor all the time, you should try to avoid gold furniture.
Without changing any of the Church’s reactionary rules on contraception, homosexuality or abortion, Francis changed the tone just by saying that Catholics should stop obsessing about sex. I cannot imagine what the nuns who ran my old high school would have thought about that theory. Really, it’s hard to overestimate what an incredible time-saver this is.
And instead of just pleading for greater charity toward the poor, Francis decreed that the world needed to drop the idea that when the rich got richer, everybody eventually benefited. Trickle-down economics amounted to a “crude and naïve trust in the goodness of those wielding economic power.” This would have been where he lost Rush Limbaugh.
Ken Langone, the billionaire co-founder of Home Depot, told Cardinal Timothy Dolan that a rich benefactor to a rebuilding project at St. Patrick’s Cathedral in New York might hesitate to cough up his promised million-dollar donation because of the pope’s attitude. Cardinal Dolan said he assured Langone that while the pope loves the poor, “he also loves rich people.”
Republican budget guru Representative Paul Ryan said the pope’s apparent lack of enthusiasm for the capitalist system was due to an unfortunate upbringing. “The guy is from Argentina. They haven’t had real capitalism in Argentina,” he told The Milwaukee Journal Sentinel. Even if Francis was down on capitalism, no capitalists wanted to sound down on Francis. Meanwhile, President Obama has spent the last five years dodging calls for new taxes and protecting the insurance industry from health care reform. Stocks have been at an all-time high, and Wall Street hates him.
The moral is: It’s way easier to be pope.
