Jeffrey Yasskin’s blog

I went to San Francisco today on the Freedom Train to attend the celebration of Martin Luther King Jr.’s birthday. The celebration left something to be desired — people were not singing in the aisles, or demanding that MLK’s work be completed. At one point, a rabbi reminded us that, though we may be “Jews and Gentiles, Protestants and Catholics”, we all worship one god. *sigh* silly monotheists. And I worry about these kinds of celebrations of individual people. It’s very easy to try to co-opt the holiday by saying, this is what Martin Luther King would have done, without considering whether he actually would. Perhaps that hasn’t happened to MLK, and I hope it never does, but it happened to Jesus, so we need to stay vigilant.

However, Martin Luther King was a great man and deserves to be remembered (as Sunshine said most eloquently). And, more importantly, his work is not completed, and urgently needs to be pursued. Unfortunately, the remaining work is harder than that already completed. Racism and other prejudices of any form are no longer publicly acceptable. There are no longer officially segregated restrooms, businesses, and schools. There is no more enemy, or rather, the enemy has melted into the general population. Blacks who kill whites are far more likely to receive the death penalty, yet it’s difficult to call any single case an instance of racism. And both blacks and latinos suffer a disproportional homicide rate, yet we don’t care enough to do much besides throwing people in prison after the fact.

A true revolution of values will soon look uneasily on the glaring contrast of poverty and wealth. With righteous indignation, it will look across the seas and see individual capitalists of the West investing huge sums of money in Asia, Africa, and South America, only to take the profits out with no concern for the social betterment of the countries, and say, “This is not just.” It will look at our alliance with the landed gentry of South America and say, “This is not just.” The Western arrogance of feeling that it has everything to teach others and nothing to learn from them is not just.

I don’t really care that some people are richer than others. I care that the rich use their money to get richer. And, even more importantly, the rich use their money to make sure their children are rich too. We talk a lot in this country about equality of opportunity, but the truth is, the poor just aren’t getting it. But the rich don’t have to know this. Increasingly, they can use their money to isolate themselves in walled gardens where they only have to interact with other rich people. As long as races remain segregated by their incomes, we rich whites can keep our prejudices about both other races and the poor by never meeting any counterexamples. And, we can continue to sabotage our society by defunding essential social programs, knowing that our money will keep us out of trouble. Until it is too late anyway. This is not just!

The rich have no right to be isolated from social problems they create. If they are unwilling to do it voluntarily, they must be forced to confront the real struggles of the working poor. It is time to desegregate the neighborhoods, not just the schools, by both race and class.

Comments, again, on the blog, so I see them and they survive more than 30 days on lj.

A scenario: Tom and Sally have sex. Sally gets pregnant. Assuming they don’t get married, what happens? Sally can abort the fetus or not. If not, she can give the child up for adoption or not. If not, Tom can pay child support or not. How should they decide what to do?

I think it is completely Sally’s decision whether to have an abortion. I don’t think this is obvious though. The potential child she’s carrying would be a shared child. At least after the child is born, they’d have roughly equal rights to it, so perhaps they should have equal rights to the fetus as well. Tom may see an abortion as killing his child. Nevertheless, as wicked_wish put it, she’s effectively carrying a life-threatening parasite, and nobody else has the right to force her to do it for nine months. However, her decision to abort or not may be informed by external circumstances, as I’ll discuss next.

The decision to give the child up for adoption is shared. Neither parent has the exclusive right to raise the child, and neither has the right to prevent or force the other to raise it. I think this is obvious, but I’d be happy to hear any disagreement.

I think the decision to pay child support is entirely up to Tom. If Tom didn’t want a kid, Sally has no right to force one on him. Of course, he should make this decision early, before Sally decides whether to abort, and if he decides not to help support the kid, it is simply no longer his child: he gets no parental rights. A promise to help support the kid should be legally and ethically binding even if he changes his mind later. But if Tom doesn’t want a child, and makes that known early, he is not a deadbeat dad.

I’m not sure what should happen if Sally doesn’t want to financially support the child, but Tom wants to keep it, and she wants to keep her parental rights. She bore the child for nine months, which should count for something, but a child costs a lot to raise, probably more than the worth of nine months of time, even nine pregnant months. It feels wrong to talk of buying parental rights, but it could be the right way to handle this. You pay $X, you get so much parental rights. The nine months of pregnancy should count as hazardous duty (double/triple normal salary?), but perhaps aren’t anything qualitatively different.

I don’t really know how child support is handled now, so the last two paragraphs may be totally off-base. But I’m sure someone among my readers will have an idea. Comments/flames here.