July 2008

Progressives sell out

Abby Bardi really missed some key points in her column “Girl Power” [June 2008]. Worse, she demonstrated the progressive movement’s insistence throughout this campaign on acting as though true progressives must support Obama. So she offered suggestions to “explain” the “intensity of [some women’s] devotion to Clinton and the conviction of some that Barack Obama should not be the Democratic nominee no matter how many delegates he has.”

What she, and virtually the entire progressive “leadership,” refuses to acknowledge, is that many genuine progressives do not support Obama in part because they don’t believe he is a progressive. Speaking for myself, anyway—and I am a progressive—I find him to be a callow, aggressively self-promoting man with a gift for progressive rhetoric that he has used to advance his personal ambition.
But the progressive movement long, long ago in this election season rejected any questioning of Obama. They decided that electing a black man was too great a symbol for a progressive to pass up—and allowed no questions as to whether he was the right black man.

Just like the major political parties we progressives had always condemned for their top-down leadership, the progressive leadership closed ranks; the opinions and emotions of the “grassroots” were ignored, even maligned in vicious terms, if they didn’t toe the “party” line. No dissension in the ranks allowed.  The progressive movement, perhaps because it sensed the possibility of obtaining power, became a party and not a movement in this election season. In all the wrong ways. No longer about seeking the truth at any cost, it became about achieving power at any cost.
I believe that this election season will, ironically, mark the beginning of the end of the progressive movement. Those who still want to search for the truth about politics, ideals, and social and civil rights will start looking elsewhere and form a new “movement.” Until it, too, gets too close to power and commits suicide.

Linda O’Brien
Takoma Park, MD

Another side to adoption

In a recent issue, the “Going Green” columnist Sat Jiwan Iklé-Khalsa suggested that ethically-minded people might consider not having children or adopting children instead of having their own biological children. I am fully in support of discussing the environmental merits of chosen childlessness. However, I must find fault with his endorsement of adoption in this context.

Adoptees are often adopted into privileged families from less privileged families, neighborhoods, or countries. Shifting a child from an environment in which s/he may never, for example, use private transportation or air travel or eat meat regularly or live in a single-family house in the suburbs into one in wherein such things are common may be just as great a drag on the environment as having one’s own biological child.

Second, his endorsement of adoption as a viable and ethical alternative to biological reproduction ignores the real and profound loss suffered by both the child and the relinquishing family upon separation. Studies indicate that adoptees are more likely that their non-adopted peers to suffer from mental disorders and are over-represented among counseling and psychiatric patients (“Adopted youths more likely to have mental disorders,” Shelton, Deborah L. and Bonnie Miller Rubin, Chicago Tribune, 6 May 2008).

Anecdotally, I can attest to many of my fellow adoptees’ experiences of alienation, anxiety, depression, and self-injury. These traumas are especially keen for those of us who have been transracially or internationally adopted. The new recommendations by the Evan B. Donaldson Adoption Institute that race be taken into consideration when placing children into adoptive homes is a small validation of this reality.

Warm and fuzzy endorsements of adoption from those who have not suffered the separations it entails should be countered with attention to the stories of those of us who have not found comfort and ease in our new identities, families, and locales and to the heartbreak of birthparents separated from their children.

I would recommend the book The Girls Who Went Away by Ann Fessler to those interested in reading first-hand accounts of the permanent injuries suffered by biological mothers compelled to relinquish their children. And I would recommend the writing of adoptees like Jane Jeong Tranka and Me-K Ahn for readers who are willing to hear the rage and pain of those of us who have suffered the loss of identities and original families and to readers willing to consider the possibility that adoption is a tool that serves the “haves” in our culture to the great disservice of those who matter less.

(Name withheld at writer’s request)
Silver Spring, MD

Hazardous road conditions

Nobody who lives in Takoma Park could fail to notice all the road work being done on our streets for the last six months. Infrastructure as old as the hills, a water delivery system badly in need of repair: tax dollars well spent. Around the corner from where I live on Hancock Avenue, construction crews have been working on a section of Carroll Ave. just down from Takoma Junction. First they would dig a trench about four feet deep and then by they end of the day they would cover it up with steel plates and soft tar. What a tough job, I would think to myself, as I waited for the flagger to let the one-way traffic through after a five minute wait so the traffic could pass from the other direction.

Then, in early June, the heat wave hit. The first day was 92. The second day was 95 and code red. The third was a scorching 98 with a high humidity and a heat index of 110. As I drove past the workers, I could see that they were suffering, and it made me think: why should people have to work under conditions that are so clearly hazardous to their health? I doubt any of us Takoma Parkers, living in our air-conditioned apartments and Victorians could last half an hour in that kind of heat without fainting. Can you imagine what it would be like spending eight hours out there?

Is the road work, which has been needed for years, so important that workers’ health must be put at risk? With global warming now an indisputable fact, you can bet there’s going to be more severe heatwaves. Why doesn’t the City Council pass a law stating that on severe Code Red days, say 95 and above, construction work must stop at noon, thereby sparing workers the terrible afternoon heat. They would be allowed to start work earlier when temperatures are less stifling. Wouldn’t this be a cost effective and more humane way of doing things?

John Guernsey
Takoma Park, MD

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