A Prayer Request

            Hello again, everyone. Since my title today is “A Prayer Request,” I want to start by assuring you that there haven’t been any calamities. No deaths, no injuries, nothing of that sort. Still, those aren’t the only things prayer is good for. The job list came out yesterday, and the process starts. First, a little explanation is in order for those of you who aren’t hunting for professorships as I am, and that’d be most people who read my blog. To my friends in grad school who haven’t done this yet, read carefully.

How the College Job Search Works:

            In the field of foreign language studies, many colleges and universities cooperate in a national database of job listings, the Job Index List or JIL, where they post job ads with qualifications and application instructions for job seekers:  whether they want an experienced professor, whether the job’s appropriate for someone starting out, whether they want an expert in film or literature or linguistics etc. So if you want to teach college Spanish, for example, you set the search parameters for Spanish and run your eye down the list of results, weeding out anything that isn’t Spanish and doesn’t match what you’re qualified to do. For example, if your specialty is twentieth-century South American film, you’re probably wasting your time and the hiring department’s time by applying to a job that asks for a medievalist or to a job that asks for a specialist in Spanish linguistics. My language, as you know, is German. My specialty is applied linguistics, which covers things like translation, foreign language teaching and so on. So, for me the first thing to do is weed out everything that asks for literature people. That’s most of them. What’s left as of today are a few post-doctoral fellowships (a sort of stepping stone between being a student and actually being a professor) and a few general positions where the hiring department hasn’t specified a field of specialization they want. In one sense, the second kind of job ad, the open one, is the toughest one to deal with, because anyone and everyone applies for it. The competition is fierce, and you don’t really find out what the department wants until you dig through it and/or have your interview.

            The application process for becoming a college prof is lengthy and uncommon. Most of the time when you want a job, you apply, interview and either get hired or else not. In the college teaching arena, you first apply. That means writing a cover letter, and in this case cover letters are always read. You make  sure your CV is up to date; this is the collegiate equivalent of a resume but with a few more categories of information. These too are scrutinized carefully. You often include a statement of teaching principles, a statement of research interests which talks about the research you’re doing and the kind you’d like to do in future, and up to three letters of recommendation written by professors who know you well, and one of those professors is always your thesis advisor. Some hiring committees want more than those things I listed, some less. Assembling and mailing this packet of information takes time, and a new packet goes out for each position you apply to. Even starting in September, you usually need October and part of November to do this first part. Next comes the initial interviews. Keep in mind that you’re usually throwing your application packet into a pool of 100-200 other applicants. The odds of even landing an initial interview are stiff, so if you get a call or an email inviting you to an interview, you’ve accomplished something worth being proud of.

            The initial interviews happen between about December to late January depending on the college’s timetable. Many schools choose to interview candidates for language positions at the Modern Languages Association conference. This year that’s in Boston, and I’m already presenting a paper there. I hope by the time I get there that I’ll be doing more than just presenting a paper. I hope to interview there as well. By the time you reach that initial interview in January or early February at the very latest, you’re only competing against about 15-20 other people. Most of them are at least as well qualified as yourself. By now the college that’s interviewing you  has weeded out all the obvious poor applicants, people who applied and weren’t really qualified, people who sent in incomplete applications, people who applied an whose materials were sloppily written, etc. If you survive the initial interview and they still want to consider you, you get invited to visit the campus. By now it’s  anywhere from early February  to about the end of March.

            When I was an M.A. student, our department hired both a new German professor and a new department head. I observed the process twice and saw it up close. A campus visit usually means a couple of days on their campus. You’ll meet all the rest of the faculty, who will be very interested in you. After all, these people might have to spend the next twenty years with you. You go through more extensive interviewing. You give a talk about your research. You probably go out to dinner with department chairs and senior faculty, socializing with them as they try to get a feel for who you are as a person and as a scholar. By this stage you’re competing against maybe two to three other people. When we brought potential German faculty to the University of Tennessee, we brought in four professors. They were all superb people, highly motivated individuals, good scholars who knew where they’d been and where they wanted to go. In the end we could, of course, only choose one. So three others lost out at this point. If you survive this interview process, you’re hired. Next comes a contract, the last chance you have to negotiate or fix anything about the terms of employment, and there comes the offer letter which you sign, seal and deliver. You’re hired. You usually notify the college  of your acceptance of the final offer by early April.

            The process is at least six months long with the prospect of rejection dogging you right up to and including the final interview stage. You’re beating odds at every point, and when you start, your odds of getting a job out of the pool of hundreds who applied for the same job are right on par with drawing a straight five card poker hand. Side note:  the odds of drawing a straight out of a deck of 52 cards with nothing wild and excluding straight flushes and royal flushes are 253 : 1. So when you’re stacked up against 200 other applicants, the tension level is comparable. I want to stay sane, however. So I’m going to celebrate every stage I complete. If I get an initial interview either over the phone or at a conference, I’ll be happy about it. If I get invited to a campus, I’ll be very happy about it, and if  I get an offer, even just one, I’ll be delighted beyond expression.

So, here’s what I’ve found thus far. Right now there are postdoctoral fellowships in Indiana and Canada that interest me and a position or two in Michigan and Texas that could be good fits. The Indiana fellowship is through Valparaiso University, a strongly Lutheran  school, and it’s designed for those who’d like to further their faith and develop their academic skills further in a Christian environment. The fellowship’s open to any humanities field, languages included. The Canadian position is a two-year fellowship at the University of Toronto. The field of interest is translation, anything having to do with it, and that’s what I’ve done for the last four years in one guise or another. The German position at the University of Michigan is a generalist position. I have no idea what they really want, and Baylor University in Dallas wants a linguist attached to the linguistics section of its English faculty. I probably qualify enough to apply there. We’ll see.

Praying without Ceasing:

            All of this brings me back to God and prayer which, as I recall, is where I started. As a bible-believing Christian, I take God seriously when he says that he knows what his plans are for me and that they’re good plans (Jeremiah 29:11). That doesn’t make the application process itself any easier. It’s hard to wait and wonder, praying all the while. At least, for me it is. Still, as a wise Christian once observed, “there are no ifs in God’s plan.”

            I want to get married too, and I didn’t want to marry while still in grad school. When we will do that,  where we will do that and how we’ll do it all somewhat depend on the outcome of this and other job searches that I’ll be doing. So, you see, there’s a bit more riding on this than my own employment prospects. At least, that’s often how it feels. That too is in God’s hands. I used the examples of odds before to give you an idea of how not easy and very much not simple this job process is. The truth, however, is that, outside of actually doing the work of making my applications, prayer is my only remedy for sanity. Why prayer and not Paxil, you ask? Good question.

            I’ve heard people say a good deal about prayer, and one of the things that keeps coming up is that so many people believe things about prayer that just aren’t true. Some say to me, “I’ve prayed about it, but I don’t feel any peace about it. I don’t feel easier in my mind or better about it.” Or some will say, “we shouldn’t pray about that. God wants us to pray for our spiritual needs, not this mundane job search or my mortgage payments.” Or some will say in effect, “God’s too busy to deal with little old me and my trivialities,” or they’ll say, “I shouldn’t pray about myself. I should pray about others. I feel selfish when asking for things for just me.” I’ve met Christians and non-Christians who raise this set of objections to praying for our needs. Some of these objections have the flavor of seeming noble, quite the selfless thing. Some of them seem sensible. They have the feel of being reasonable, rational, sensible, of being anything except helpful and truthful.

            Consider with me a moment. “Let us reason together,” as God says in Isaiah. In Matthew 6, starting in verse 5, Jesus says a good deal about prayer. He tells us how we shouldn’t pray, ostentatiously or so that we’re seen doing so like a politician’s prayer. He then gives us a template for praying, the Lord’s prayer. Some treat the Lord’s prayer like a formula, as though the words of this prayer are, themselves, the only prayer we should be praying. Yet, if you look at it as a blueprint for prayer, you quickly see there are a number of things he commands us to ask for. Some are indeed very spiritual:  forgiveness, the willingness and ability to forgive others, for God’s will to be done, to lead us away from temptation and so on. But we also are called on to pray for our daily bread. This conjures up the image of a bread loaf, but applying it to Americans today, it goes beyond food. It suggests God’s interested in our physical needs:  employment, shelter, food, clothing, etc. In fact, Jesus says a lot in verses 5-15 of that chapter about how to pray, what to pray for and so on. Dealing with the first objection, he never says, not once, that praying will bring you an immediate feeling of peace and certainty. It is, I am afraid, not a magic formula. He said in effect, :pray like this.” He did not say, “pray, and you will feel better about your situation.” But it’s clear to me that we are to pray and to pray persistently for our needs.

            This fiction that God is too busy or too divine to be interested in our mundane life events is both common and unfortunate. It’s at the root of what people are thinking when they tell you to pray for your spiritual needs only or if they feel embarrassed about praying for their day to day needs or if they tell you, usually cynically, that God is obviously not listening or not interested. God tells us again and again throughout the bible to call on him. He’s very interested in our human difficulties. In Psalm 50, the psalmist quotes God directly, “call on me in the day of trouble;
    I will deliver you, and you will honor me” (Verse 15). Several hundred years later the prophet Jeremiah again quotes God, “Call to me and I will answer you and tell you great and unsearchable things you do not know” (Jeremiah 33:3). We pray to a God who is listening, waiting for us to entreat him with our needs. Again in Jeremiah, God speaks and says in part, “you will call on me and come and pray to me, and I will listen to you” (Jeremiah 29:12).

God’s Answer:

I firmly believe that God answers prayer. Sometimes the answer is something we can figure out. We pray that John’s cancer is cured, and it is. Skeptics would attribute this to medical science alone. I’m not a skeptic. Sometimes, his answer isn’t something we see at the time it’s delivered. Sometimes we have to wait a lifetime. Maybe that man or woman you begged God to let you marry at age 25 wasn’t right for you, and you were 65 when you figured that out. Sometimes, God’s purposes and his answers are unknown and unknowable. I admit that one’s hard. We love answers in our culture, the faster the answer comes, the better. We academics thrive on seeking answers in one form or another. Still, this is God we’re talking about. In the 55^th chapter of Isaiah God makes this point about himself,  "For my thoughts are not your thoughts, neither are your ways my ways," declares the Lord.  “As the heavens are higher than the earth, so are my ways higher than your ways and my thoughts than your thoughts" (Isaiah 55:8-9). If you want a glimpse, a glimmer of insight into God’s perspective in saying this, think about how you would explain your decision to move across the world and take up a new job to your three-year-old. Could you explain ideas of promotion, cross-cultural exchange, multinational corporations and trade deals to a three-year-old in minute detail? I doubt it. And if our intellects and abilities to reason are so much more refined, if our access to knowledge and ability for strategic thinking are so much better developed than those of the average three-year-old, how much more so are God’s abilities in those areas developed beyond our capacities?

            Finally, God sometimes says ‘no.’ That one can be harder than the unknown. Our sense of entitlement is vast in America. We hate the word ‘no.’ You can see it in many ways, from the kicking and screaming toddler, to the rejected college applicant, to the denied promotion or the denied marriage proposal. As a culture that thrives on answers, we are very unwilling  to take ‘no’ for one. We demand to know why. We ask God why he does things. In and of itself, asking ‘why’  isn’t irreverent. The whole book of Habakkuk shows us a prophet basically asking, “God, why are you doing this!” We are not, however, guaranteed an answer. To Habakkuk God said essentially, and here I’m paraphrasing, , “I am doing this so that both my wrath against your enemies and, too,  my love for you will be plainer to you than ever before. (Habakkuk 1:5-12). To Job he said, “Where were you when I laid the Earths foundation?” (Job 38:4). When Peter, who is by far my favorite apostle, persisted in quizzing the Lord about his intentions and motives,  Jesus said, “What is that to you? You must follow me” (john 21:22).

            So, we’re not guaranteed the answers we want or that we’ll understand what God does. He doesn’t work on our timetable or on our notions of what should or should not be. “If that’s true,” you may reasonably ask, “what assurances do I have at all that God’s worth trusting with my affairs?” I’ve heard forms of this question too. In strictly human terms, it’s understandable. Would you entrust your financial affairs or your children’s welfare to someone who may or may not do as you ask and whose intentions and motives are sometimes unknown and perhaps unfathomable? No, of course not. Yet, you entrust yourself to others in just that way every time you go to work for a new company, take a bus or an airplane or even get married. So in God’s case, what assurances about his intentions do we have? How do we know that he means well in your search for a spouse or my search for a job? We have an answer again in Jeremiah. In a letter written to the exiles at Babylon, the prophet quotes God,  “For I know the plans I have for you,” declares the Lord, “plans to prosper you and not to harm you, plans to give you hope and a future” (Jeremiah 29:11). In other words, my friends, one way or the other, it’ll all work out to your good whether you recognize that good or not. It’s not the easiest answer, but on balance, I can live with it.

Pray For Me:

Now, I’m going to ask you to pray with me as I go through the academic job search  for the first time and likely not the last time. I don’t know how it will turn out. I don’t know where I’ll be next year. I could be drawing food stamps and on social security. Who knows? Who indeed knows? I do not know. God knows. Remember that about your own life as well. I don’t know what you’re going through:  unemployment, tragedy in the family, up for promotion at work, trying to buy a house or trying to have a baby. Whatever it is, you too need prayer. So I ask those of you who read this to pray for me, and if you’ve never prayed before, pray for you first. Meanwhile, that’s where I am. It begins.

A Dangerous Mood

            Hello again. The writer and speaker Ravi Zacharias once said something I found very interesting:  “A mood can be a dangerous state of mind, because it can crush reason under the weight of feeling.” In the wake of the 09/11 attacks, we went through a period of nearly hysterical anti-Islam. In World War II we were rabidly anti-Japanese, even going so far as to intern many Japanese-Americans in ghettos and camps in the continental U.S. A further example:  there was a time in this country when you could not easily find employment if you were an atheist and open about it. See the case of Bertrand Russell, dismissed in 1940 from the City College of New York for his atheistic and anti-religious views. All of these are examples of what we might call ‘mood.’ A mood may or may not reflect the legal situation at a given place and time. It may even be that laws themselves often come out of the mood, you could say out of the zeitgeist, of a place at a particular time.  A mood can be a dangerous thing. It can suppress rational thought and even pervert the course of justice e.g. my previous examples. I begin to wonder whether I’m detecting a different sort of mood in this second decade of the 21^st century.

I was at church this morning when a fellow from U. of I. asked me if I’d seen a new report that allegedly demonstrates that there’s been a consistent rise in hostility towards Christians in America. As it happens, I had not seen this report. I didn’t even know it existed, and I was skeptical. After all, no one knows better than a researcher how the presentation of statistics and case precedents can shade, color or distort what is actually going on. If you emphasize certain facts, suppress others, shade your language so that you make this or that point, you can influence your readers to think as you want them to. Our media does it every hour of every day, quite successfully, I might add. So, though I am a Christian, I was immediately suspicious of a report that purported to make that claim.

            I came home with Nicole and Delaney and looked up the report. It runs for 140 pages, and most of that is a listing of over 600 incidents involving attacks upon the expression of Christian faith. Each incident is well cited, so I could look it up if I wanted to. That’s just good research practice on the authors’ part. This blog post isn’t going to be a rehashing of that report. Though I will post a link to it for those who, like me, don’t want to take someone else’s word and want to examine the document for themselves. I’ll present one or two cases, but I’m going to supplement my discussion of the report with my own experience. After twelve years of study at three large state universities, I can say I’ve had plenty of opportunity to examine this mood for myself. My conclusions will be free of paranoia and well-reasoned even if some disagree.

The Report

“Survey of Religious Hostility in America”

By the Liberty Institute and the Family Research Counsel

Introductions by Pres. Kelly Shackelford of the Liberty Institute and Tony Perkins, head of the Family Research Counsel

Here are two sites where you can, as of this writing, download a full copy of the report as a PDF:

http://www.foxnews.com/us/2012/08/24/christians-victims-rising-hostility-from-govt-and-secular-groups-report-says

http://www.westernjournalism.com/report-christians-victims-of-rising-hostility-from-govt-and-secular-groups/

            Case No. 1:

Barton v. Balch Springs (2004).

            Senior citizens at a senior citizens center in Balch Springs Texas were told that they could no longer pray before meals or listen to inspirational music or sing gospel songs during mealtime. The city had recently passed new legislation forbidding religion in public buildings. The seniors sued and were allegedly told that if they won their suit, their meals would be taken away in that place because, the city argued, praying over government-funded meals demonstrated a constitutional conflict. The Department of Justice opened a probe into the matter as well, and the case was resolved in favor of the seniors. The final ruling held that private religious expression like theirs wasn’t the sort of government-sponsored religious talk that the constitution was designed to prevent.

Case No. 2:

Cenzon-DeCarlo v. Mount Sinai Hospital (2010).

            Catherina Cenzon-Decarlo started work as an operating room nurse at Mount Sinai Hospital in 2004. During the hiring process, she had the opportunity to sign a form as a conscientious objector to certain medical procedures, and in her form Miss Cenzon-Decarlo indicated that she would not perform abortions because of her religious objections to it. Well enough. Abortions, it seemed, were procedures you could be exempted from having to assist with. In May of 2009, she was ordered by the hospital to assist in a late-term abortion and threatened with termination and loss of her license if she did not comply. She lost in both district court and in the 2^nd circuit court. I looked up the circuit court’s ruling, and the court ruled that the laws that gave protection on the grounds of religious objection didn’t make any allowance for private actions. In other words, Catherina was indeed protected from this sort of discrimination under the law, but, and here’s the trick, she had no right to sue under this particular law as a private citizen. On that basis her whole case was dismissed.

Case No. 3:

Nielson and the Freedom From Religion Foundation v. School District Five of Lexington

& Richland Counties (2012).

            For a number of years now, Irmo High in Lexington County South Carolina has allowed its senior class to vote on whether the seniors will have a prayer at their graduation. The class votes, and a volunteer delivers the prayer if the class voted in favor of it. This isn’t something the school makes them do; it’s the students’ decision, and I suppose sometimes no prayer happens. Well, Matthew Nielson felt that his fellow classmates’ tradition was a violation of his constitutional liberties, and he tried to have the school put a stop to it. The school argues that it’s not officially endorsing the event, that it’s a student-initiated thing and so they’re not obligated to quash it. The case is still pending. Nielson is working with the Freedom From Religion Foundation to press his suit. Whether he will succeed or not is uncertain.

The American Mood:

            That report contains hundreds of cases. Some were resolved in a way that I agreed with and found legally sound. Others were resolved in a way that I personally didn’t agree with, but that I find legally sound. Still others seem to be neither legally sound nor right. On the plus side, one thing that came up for me as I read is that our judicial system can rule in favor of Christians, even if some radical right-wingers want you to think it never does. Sometimes, as my cases above showed, the Christians won, and that was wonderful for them. Sometimes they lost, and some of those losses, I regard as terribly unjust. My concern isn’t with the law. I’m not a lawyer and will never be one. Nor do I think that a long listing of legal case precedents, no matter whose side they favor, can adequately demonstrate the full extent of a mood.

My question is this:  is there really a mood of intolerance towards Christians in America today? I think there is. I’ve met students who, when stating opinions in my classes, worded their opinions in the most secular, non-sectarian way possible. Then in my office, it would come out that they really felt otherwise or that they didn’t express their whole opinion on the subject. I’ve discovered a number of practicing, professing Christian students during office hour conversations like that. One thing that came up again and again during my years as a graduate teaching assistant is that many Christian students are afraid to make statements about their faith or to bring their faith into opinions on political or moral issues in the classroom. Why? Aren’t our universities built on a free exchange of ideas? If they are, then atheists, agnostics and peoples of every faith should be free to share their opinions. Yet, I’ve observed that Christians in particular feel that they cannot do so.

For my own part, for a long time I had a bible verse in my university email signature. Mostly, no one commented on it. It was in German, and that may have shielded me from attack. One professor in my doctoral program, however, took me aside one afternoon and warned me in the friendliest way imaginable that as I’m going on the academic job market, I might want to take that verse out of my email. She explained that some people might view it as a form of religious proselytizing. As I think about it, I recall that I’ve seen many an email with a signature at the bottom. Often times the signature is a literary or political quote. If I included a verse from the Qur’an or a verse from the Bhagavad Gita, no one would have said a word. But because it was a bible verse, and one from the New Testament, I have to worry about being sued for religious harassment or infringing somebody’s constitutional rights.

I wonder. I could include a quote from Richard Dawkins’ book The God Delusion about how harmful religion is and how it ought to be quashed in some email or statement or other, and nobody would bat an eye. I could write a pro-Islamic statement about peace and Islam in light of our terrorism troubles and describe how the Qur’an is being misused by terrorists, quoting chapter and verse from it and from the hadiths, and I wouldn’t hear a word. I’d probably be lauded as multicultural, inclusive and an agent for intercultural dialogue. I could probably start up a student interest group that explores the ideas and tenets of Jainism, and I’d have no trouble doing so.

Suppose, on the other hand, that I wrote a statement opposing some university initiative, and in doing so, I based my stance on it explicitly on my Christian faith? Supposing I was teaching an applied ethics course and I argued from a Judeo-Christian perspective that there are absolute truths and there are fixed standards of right and wrong? What if a student came to my office and saw me with a braille bible on my desk? They wouldn’t recognize what the braille book is, so they’d ask me, and I’d tell them that it’s part of the bible. In the climate of today, I could then be sued for it. I’d likely win, but the lawsuit would still get filed, I’m sure.

The first amendment can cut both ways. Today, it’s popular to employ it every time you want to suppress a religious display, practice, speech or anything else in the public arena. Yet I argue that it works the other way. Shouldn’t I be free to express my opinions too? You don’t hear about atheists being sued in this country today because they say something non-sectarian. You just don’t see that. But let a student mention God or Jesus Christ in a valedictory speech, let a professor offer a Christian-like opinion, let a person refuse to participate in some work-related function because of religious convictions, and all hell breaks loose. That, in general terms, is the mood of our country in this second decade of the twenty-first century.

It is a mood that succeeds in large part because of postmodern ideals. In the postmodern age, nothing is really true, nothing is really right or really wrong, and all the rest is relative. What’s true for you is true for you, and what’s true for me is true for me, so the attitude goes. I think one of the reasons Christianity is attacked so vigorously in this climate is that it asserts that there are truths and there is right and there is wrong. It’s not the only faith that does so. Islam also holds truths to be absolute. Judaism definitely asserts the rightness or wrongness of many things. But it is politically dangerous to challenge those faiths for a number of reasons. In contrast, attacking Christianity is, to put it simply, safe.

Ravi Zacharias once summed up this mood as follows:

Philosophically, you can believe anything so long as you do not claim it to be true. Morally, you can practice anything so long as you do not claim that it is a better way. Religiously, you can hold to anything so long as you do not bring Jesus Christ into it. If a spiritual idea is Eastern, it is granted critical immunity. If western, it is thoroughly criticized. Thus a journalist can walk into a church and mock its carryings on, but he or she dare not do the same of ceremonies from the Eastern fold.

Conclusion:

I’m not going to say that what’s happening in America amounts to religious persecution. Not today, at least. That’s a word that many on the right like to throw about far too frequently. To me, using that word in this country would be a disservice to the Christians of present-day Sudan, to the Christians of ancient Rome and to the Jews who died in the Shoah. Yet, Liberal America isn’t nearly so tolerant as it wants to think itself to be. Christianity is tolerated less and less, and people who believe in the truth of the bible are seen as oddities at best, and as narrow-minded self-righteous bigots at worst. The bible challenges our notions of universalism, of relative truths and self-determined value systems. That makes it, and those who believe in it, unpopular. I wonder uneasily what will happen in America over the course of the rest of my life. I wonder very uneasily indeed.

Why Would You DO This?

            Hello once again. I hope everyone’s having a peaceful Labor Day weekend. Here in Illinois it’s rained for much of the weekend, and while I don’t usually like rain, the mid-west has needed it badly. Delaney and I have been home for exactly three weeks, and she’s settled in nicely. Most of the last three weeks have been spent getting her settled in. On the humorous side of things, I was charged a $13 “new patient fee” at my vet clinic to establish her medical file there. I pointed out that I’d been there with Rudy, my first guide dog, and so, I asked, should I really be charged this fee? “Oh, Sir,” replied the very kind lady at the desk, “you’re not the patient. That’s Delaney.” “But I’m the one paying the fee,” I reasoned. “True,” she said, “but we call you the client. But Delaney is our patient.” ...... One of those interesting moments. Finally, Delaney has taken to Nicole without any troubles. Nicole has, naturally, adopted her.

            I have some blogs planned for the coming weeks, and I look forward to writing them, but first I want to ask you to think with me about texting. Texting is, of course, nothing new, and there’s a lot that could be said about it. First, my own credentials on the subject. As a blind person, I came to texting rather late in the game. Only when I got the Samson Convoy through Verizon did I start to text. It’s convenient for some things, and I keep it as one mode of communication if not necessarily my main means of staying in touch. Now I have an iPhone. The jury’s still out on that one. So, I’ve become more and more aware of the texting culture, for lack of a better term.

            The issue on my mind today came to the for when I read this in a friend’s Facebook status:

If you ever walk behind someone who's texting, you'll discover that not only do they walk VERY slowly, but they have the magical ability to sense which side you're trying to pass them on. They slowly drift in that direction, cutting off any escape, so you have no choice but walk behind them and endure their horribly slow pace and ignorant button-mashing. I bet that 70% of all instances of lateness for faculty and students at UNCG are caused by text-walkers.
AND ANOTHER THING: Have you ever been run into head-on by a text-walker? It's not fun. Just as they can sense anyone trying to pass behind them, they can sense anyone trying to maneuver around them from the front. And with their eyes fixed on their phones all the while, they will mirror your steps until they run into you. This collision, no matter what you did to try and prevent it, is entirely your fault. You know this because their eyes suddenly jolt back up to real life to meet yours in a dirty, accusing glare. In some cases, they harshly remind you to watch where you're going, which suffuses the situation with irony, but unfortunately does nothing for your bruised body, splashed coffee, or trampled toes. You keep walking, with an injured body and injured pride, and hope that they soon walk right into a brick wall.

These comments—and here I’ve only included a portion of what she had to say—make me ask the question once again, are sighted people that stupid? I’ve been in more than one car where the driver insisted on texting while driving, and I have been hit by distracted walking texters. How did I know they were texting? You can hear the click of the buttons as their thumbs wear themselves out. Plus, there’s just a certain dazed air to these people. If they’re not high, not listening to their iPods and not sobbing hysterically, yet they still seem dazed and not quite there when they hit you, they’re probably texting. I’ve been hit by pedestrians and have had several close calls with bicyclists on my campus.

Where does the word ‘stupid’ come into it, you ask? Am I not being a bit too harsh? I think ‘stupid’ is a perfectly justifiable word because these people are dangerous. To make my point, let’s increase the speed of the texters and talk about them in their cars. If you’re talking on your cell while in the car, you probably have a hands-free set, at least these days. Failing all else, you can cradle the phone between your neck and shoulder and keep your eyes on the road. Texting, however, requires you to take at least one eye, possibly both, off the road for up to 5 seconds at a time while you read and reply to the message, the amount of time it takes to drive the length of a football field. How many crashes have there been, not to mention people killed in crashes, that were directly caused by some putz having his or her eyes glued to their phone while they distractedly cruised through an intersection? Legal experts and insurance companies disagree, but it’s in the thousands at the very least and those are just the ones that get reported.

We all know about the instinct for self-preservation. It’s the instinct that makes you want to run or hide when you here gunshots nearby, or it’s the instinct you have to overcome in order to run into a burning building and save a helpless victim. Obviously, it’s less well-honed in quite a number of individuals. Texting while moving, whether in a car, on your bike or your own two feet, has never made sense to me. The first time I heard about it I thought, surely only a handful of very foolish people do this dumb thing. Apparently I was being an optimist. My question is ‘why.’ Why would it occur to you that it’s ok to get into extended text chats while driving your date to dinner or your kids to school? Why do you glare at me, as my friend’s comments above suggest, when you plough into me? It’s your own fault.

The only answer I can find that makes any sense at all is wrapped up in our cultural notion of invincibility. People think, “not to me,” “over there, but not here,” “it’ll happen to that guy, but not me.” This is very youth-like thinking, but it’s not just our teens and young adults that are guilty of it. If it were, I could say that it’s something people grow out of. That, however, does not appear to be the case.

As a blind person I feel myself at greater risk here. I don’t have the option of offering to let me drive if your conversation is that important. I have to either leave your car or take your phone out of your hand. End of options. I haven’t had to do either of these yet, but remember that cab drivers are like anyone else and prone to do it. I know of a driver who wrecked her cab—fortunately without a customer inside—because she didn’t stop in time. She was, guess what, texting while driving. So, this is a practice I have no patience with.

Do I sound irritated? Shouldn’t  I be? I’m always the passenger, and someone’s irresponsibility with their texting not only endangers them—something they’re perfectly free to do at their own risk, this being America—but it puts me at risk. No thanks. I don’t have a tidy solution here. I know that states all over the country are trying to curb this phenomenon. Fort Lee New Jersey has made it illegal to text and walk, the penalty being a $85 ticket. In that state it’s also illegal to text or use a cell phone while driving. In light of these laws, I suppose my point is that they shouldn’t be necessary. Texting while walking or driving is so obviously dangerous that, if just one or two people did it, we could dismiss it and say, “they were just being stupid.” Well, if a whole country is doing it, they’re still being stupid, and personally, I don’t want to pay for someone else’s inattention by being run down in the street by a distracted, texting driver. No thanks.

My Reflections on Guide Dog Training

            Hello again. I’ve been absent from my blog longer than usual, but I’ve also been busier than usual. I’m glad to say that from the end of June onwards, I’ve been with folks and doing things. I was blessed to have friends come up to Champaign for the 4^th of July, and I returned with them to Tennessee for a couple of weeks. Since the end of July, I’ve been spending time in Portland Oregon training with my second guide dog. That being the most important event of the summer, I’m devoting this blog post to that training. No, this isn’t going to be some endless, sappy rambling about how great dogs are and how everyone should have one. No, it won’t be that. This posting is more intended for those who have little experience with guide dogs or service animals generally and who have little to know idea what training with one is really like. My blind friends who have trained with them may choose to skip this blog post, or else not. In any case, no matter how many other people tweet, post Facebook statuses about or even journal their guide dog training, my experiences and reflections remain uniquely mine, and so I’ll offer them to you. I want to write them down now, the day of graduation and the day before I leave. I want my reflections to have the benefit of clear and exacting memory.

Getting here:  it was supposed to be a direct flight from Chicago to Portland. Long story short, I missed it by ninety seconds. Why and how are not important. Suffice it to say there was some mistiming involved, some mine and some not mine, and I missed my plane. Southwest put me on a flight through Vegas at no charge, and I had the pleasure of sitting at my gate in Vegas waiting on my Portland connection and listening to slot machines going non-stop on the concourse. I’ve been through the McCarran Airport before a couple times, but this was the first time I really sat there and took it in. Why wouldn’t there be slots in the Vegas airport, after all? As P. T. Barnum is said to have once commented, “there’s a sucker born every minute.” So I listened to flights being called and passengers being paged against the incongruous background noise of slot machine music and handles being pulled. I didn’t wager, because as I saw it, I’d already lost my bet for the day. Namely, I bet I’d get to Portland on time. I lost.

            Monday, July 30, was the first full day of action. My instructor walked up to me and introduced herself as April. She was the apprentice instructor, the equivalent of a graduate teaching assistant for those who are in the college world. The instructors and supervisors and those in the know call the first full day of a new class Christmas. It’s said all the students can think, talk and breathe that day is the question of what kind of dog they’ll get. A lab? What color? Male or female? It goes on and on. That first day is about familiarizing you with the leash and harness. So, picture a bunch of grown adults walking down a dormitory hallway, one holding the leash or harness or  with the leash attached to a dog-like simulator and the student on the other end giving commands and waiting to see them carried out, or else not. That was our morning. That’s how it started. That morning was all leash and all harness and all simulated work. If only my simulated dog could have run me into a simulated door. Ah well. The doors remained real.

            That afternoon after lunch we were given our dogs. They brought them down to our rooms individually, came in, told us a bit about the dog and left us alone for about twenty minutes. The dog April brought me was a large yellow lab, Malloy. A gentle giant, so to speak. The rest of that Monday was spent working with the dog, basic body positioning and so on for making turns, techniques and hand gestures for getting the dog to move and to stop, etc.

            Tuesday was our first day in downtown Portland. This school is located in the town of Boring, east of Portland in Clackamas County. Since it can afford to, the school leases a good deal of space in downtown Portland at 3^rd and Yamhill, where it maintains a base of operations. Wi-Fi internet, a stocked snack room, kenneling for the dogs, it goes on. We began that day to learn our first rout. A good seven blocks there and seven more back. It wasn’t that they wanted to teach us about Portland per se. So guide dog training differs from more traditional O and M training in that way. We were to learn this rout because working it, we had the opportunity to make the moves and the mistakes through which our instructors were there to teach. Running into a mailbox? Did that. Trying to go straight while the dog decides to hang a left? Did that. Trying to hang a left while the dog’s trying to pull me in the proper direction? Did that too. Had the dog not stop at a curb and step out into the street? Yep Those are typical mistakes both for the dog and the human, and making them in those first days is no poor reflection on the dog or the human being.

            We worked that rout twice a day, every day. I will probably remember it ten years from now:  Up 3^rd from Yamhill, crossing Taylor, Salmon and Main, right to Main, and up Main, crossing 3rd, 4^th and 5^th, left along 5^th, crossing Madison, and don’t forget to take the curving right into Starbucks. We worked that rout through Friday afternoon. For me, it was incredibly tough. Not because of the rout or the exercise. Those were fine, but poor Malloy. It wasn’t working.

            I’m not the fastest walker in the world, but I’m not slow. I’m probably a bit faster than average. I like to move at a nice brisk clip, not a Sunday stroll. Unfortunately, the school had the idea based on their paperwork that I was a slower walker. It happens. Matching a dog with a human handler is no science. More like art. You take the person’s physical size and weight into account, of course. But also their pace, their temperament, their own preferences, and you look through your dogs who are ready and pray you’ll find at least two to choose from. So, we couldn’t get Malloy up to my pace and keep him there. While other students hopped busses and light rails, I was pounding the pavement with my instructor and our class supervisor, motivating my dog and trying to correct and improve my own shortcomings with my physical technique. Malloy’s other problem is that his confidence in himself isn’t as high as I need it to be. He’ll make a great guide, but he needs to be matched with a cautious traveler who likes to puzzle things out. Me? I like to move. If something’s wrong, I’ll solve it on the way. I needed a dog who was, as Jim put it, a doer, not a thinker.

            Saturday, August 4^th, was the hardest day emotionally speaking. We walked and walked and walked, trying this and that and the other, trying to get this dog and myself to begin functioning effectively, but Saturday we admitted defeat. Switching dogs isn’t something that happens all the time, but it’s not rare either. It’s also not easy. Jim, the supervisor, put it this way, “I want to put you on that plane with the thing you came here to get, the best mobility aid possible, and I think we both know, that’s just not Malloy.” I let them take Malloy that afternoon. He’s back in the kennels now awaiting the next class. Whoever gets him will get a fine, fine animal, and I wish them well. But even knowing it was best for me, letting go of Malloy was taxing for me. It wasn’t easy for April either. You invest yourself in these animals, bonding with them emotionally, working with them on unfamiliar streets, trusting your safety and in some cases your life, to them. Then to surrender the dog … even for the best of reasons and the best of intentions, that giving up of the dog is hard. So Sunday I was dogless. The silver lining is that I got to really get away from campus, what with no dog to feed that afternoon, and spend some time with some good friends here in Portland indulging our star trek interests.

            Monday morning, August 6, was crunch time. August 6 was the single longest day of our training, because in addition to the morning and afternoon routs, there was a required night walk. So we didn’t get done until about 10:30 that night. For me, there was even more to do. I had to make an important choice. I took my cane to Portland that day, and it felt odd to walk into that center tapping away and looking for the stairs. Jim took me into his office and told me the deal. There were two dogs on the way with a trainer. I would walk a short rout with each dog in turn and then I’d make my choice. Well, Jim can change his mind, and he changed his mind about the “short” part of his plan for me to walk two “short” routs with the test dogs. If anything, we walked longer ones. I walked ten blocks or so with each dog before making my choice. One dog was a yellow lab, a male. He had a lot going for him, but the female black lab was definitely for me. She had a raw energy and an assertiveness I liked. If I drifted, she’d pull me back online. If I corrected her, she went with it and kept putting one paw in front of the other. So I chose her. As it happened, I chose the dog that Jim and April, my instructor, had in mind for me. Though the other guy would’ve been fine too, Delaney was simply a bit better and had the sort of energy and personality that appealed most to me. So, Delaney it now is. I went on that day to walk my required afternoon rout and my night rout in the town of Gresham.

            The second week of the program at Guide Dogs for the Blind differs markedly from the first week. The first week is all about the basics. You have to learn how to make turns, how to stop and start and how to turn on the move, and a hundred other things that go into the mechanics of walking with a guide dog as well as learning the basics of managing and controlling your animal. They are still dogs, after all, and keeping up their discipline and maintaining your own authority in the pack is crucial. Otherwise, and I know from experience, all hell breaks loose. So that first week everybody walks the same routs and learns the same things. The second week is more about customizing your training to what you need. Supposing one guy lives in Chicago and needs to practice hopping city trains and cruising down congested sidewalks and crossing busy streets, while another girl lives on a college campus in a smaller town or city. She might need a mix of residential neighborhoods, campus classroom buildings and the sort of winding, interconnected paths like what you find on a college campus. And for giggles, supposing you also have the guy who lives in rural West Virginia. He needs to learn how to walk along two-lane blacktop country roads with gravel shoulders or how to walk along the verge of a state highway safely. All of them can be and are accommodated in this program without loss of time or without making students learn a bunch of stuff they’ll never use. You get what you need. With only six students per class, and one instructor for every two students, this is possible in a way that a more traditional program wouldn’t be able to match where the classes are bigger. Also, this customization is one of the reasons the full training can be done in two weeks instead of four.

            One of  the final things we all did together happened Tuesday morning. It’s called traffic check. It involves a supervisor, namely Jim, driving around in his hybrid car, sometimes on battery, swerving in front of, close beside, or behind you, backing out in front of you, making a right turn on red and swinging across your path as you cross the street, or just sitting there in his car blocking the whole sidewalk. Sound scary? For the dogs, it is. We humans knew what was coming, though as I pointed out to April, there’s something to be said for not warning us and forcing us to trust our animals completely. The point of the exercise was to test the reactions of the dogs. Did they stop? Did they back away? Etc. It was also an exercise aimed at showing us how our animals would react to danger without actually endangering us.

            Tuesday was also the day of the vet visit. Mine was uneventful. Delaney is, and pretty much has always been, in excellent health. That afternoon, we walked a rout in a quiet residential neighborhood, and Jim marveled at how much of an improvement Delaney was. We moved quickly and smoothly down those twisting sidewalks and across those off-angled intersections where the sidewalks didn’t line up at the corners. We also drove to another part of Gresham and did sidewalkless travel. That is, it is perfectly safe to walk along the roadside in areas where there are no sidewalks. There are techniques for this. My exposure to it was shorter because I rarely have to.

            Wednesday morning we went downtown. Some people worked escalators, some worked downtown streets, and some people did other things. April and I walked six blocks to 6^th and Main and caught the bus. This was something others had already done while Malloy and I worked out our differences. From there, we hopped a train around 6^th and Davis and took it, just practicing boarding, riding and exiting public transportation with the dog. Wednesday afternoon continued the transportation theme, and we all trooped out to Portland International Airport to practice the technique for passing through airport security. Delaney moved confidently and assertively through the terminal, dodging tables, suitcases and other travelers with a brisk, no nonsense half trot that didn’t brook any hesitation on my end. Not, by that point, that I was inclined to wonder whether she knew what she was doing.

            Thursday, August 9, was completely up to the student and instructor as to how to spend it. We went down to a different area of Portland, to Lloyd’s Center. April asked me what I wanted to do, and I told her I wanted to challenge myself and my dog. By now, downtown outdoor travel was humdrum. We’d done it, and there wasn’t much more to be said about it. We’d worked in buildings, and there wasn’t much to be said there. So I asked her to direct us through stores, preferably ones with narrow aisles and distractions. We walked through Good Will, through Safeway, and through one other store whose name escapes me. I wasn’t there to shop. I wanted to make Delaney navigate obstacles, negotiate pinpoint turns, and give myself something to think about. So that’s just what we did. It wasn’t flawless, but if it had been, I would not have learned anything, right? It was well-done, though. That afternoon, we walked through Red Sunset Park, which is basically a duck pond and baseball diamond. April and the other instructors tried to get the ducks to come out and distract our dogs, but the ducks weren’t interested.

            Finally, Friday was our fun day. We went to Clackamas Town Center Mall. The guide work point of the exercise was for us to shop independently, navigating the mall and the stores in it as best we could. Otherwise, it was just a chance for us to have fun. Lastly, we sat down after lunch and were given a great deal of information in a large binder both about our dog and about programs and services available to us now..

I graduate this afternoon, and while my puppy raisers, the folks who raise your dog until it enters formal guide dog training, can’t make it here from Colorado to attend, my friends Scot and Christopher will come in from north Portland. We may well leave after that, and so it’s probably better that I write this before graduation, not after. I have some nice jeans and a button-down shirt, about as formal as I mean to get, and I’m the only one looking forward to delivering the brief remarks we’re allowed and encouraged to give at the ceremony.

            The food here has been excellent. There were three choices for each meal each day we were here. Most of those meals came with salads, and I chose vegetarian entrees more than once; they were that good. I drank iced tea with splenda and ate sugar free desserts, keeping my glucose under control. That is, I ate sugar free desserts … most of the time. Let’s be honest there. Most people gain weight on this training from the richness and volume of food. I didn’t. I weigh what I did when I got here.

            I suppose, last but not least, I find myself thinking about the people here. We had some great conversations. Our supervisor, Jim, often sat down with me and he and I talked about the nuts and bolts of training, the theory behind the theory of what we learned, teaching methods for students, teaching methods for dogs, teaching methods for apprentice instructors like mine. April and I often talked about the reasons behind students learning what they learned when they learned it, and she proved very receptive to my questions and ideas on the subject. The students have been fun. I think coming here has allowed Nicole to make a new friend, and my accent talents got something of a workout here.

So, it’s over. Looked at another way, it’s only just beginning. My hope, intention and sincere prayer is that I do things better with this dog than I did with my last one. I let his discipline off the job lapse a bit, and that had consequences. Not that I needed to be a task master, but more attentiveness on my part would have been appropriate. So that is what I’ll do. I leave early Sunday morning. 8:15 to Oakland California, and from there into Chicago, and from there to Champaign by Amtrak. Can you see why I didn’t write this Sunday night? It will be a long day, but I hope and pray it is only the first of many years with this second guide dog. May she be around to witness some great events in my life.

So Sue Me!

            Hello again. It’s been a month or so since my last posting, and I’ve been silent for two reasons. The first is that I’ve been busy. Teaching summer courses can be fun and exhausting. This summer’s beginning German course was a bit of both. I think my co-instructor and friend would agree with that. What is more, I know our students would say the same. The highlight of the course, at least for me, was my getting to perfect my Australian English. When I say ‘perfect,’ I mean that I approached it linguistically, sounds and word segments and listening to the speech of our Australian student. I think after he got over the sheer strangeness of my questions and requests for help with my Australian, he rather got into it. My fiancé, who doesn’t think my Australian accent suits me very well, is resigned. Besides the summer course, I’ve settled into summer dissertation work, all to be done ahead of Fall’s job search. I’m appreciative of both my summer stipend and next year’s Max Kade fellowship, and now work can safely supersede graduate student poverty on the list of things to think about. Work aside, the dentist was fun. Three and a half hours of my life I can’t ever get back, though if it means I keep my teeth, I won’t complain too much.

The other reason I’ve kept silent is that I haven’t had much to say. I try to publish meaningfully, and I suppose we could debate the word ‘meaningful.’ All the same, writing one of these posts takes hours or days, and I like putting things out there that might leave you thinking or laughing or cursing … or all three. For today I thought about a number of things and I settled on lawsuits. Why lawsuits, you ask? No, no one’s suing me that I know of. Rather, I was thinking about the reputation of lawyers in this country. In many other countries the law is a respected and honored profession. Friends from overseas then come over here and ask me why we make all these lawyer jokes. It’s a fair question. What they don’t realize is that in many cases, lawyers bring the scorn and contempt of the American public down on themselves. I want to show you a sampling of lawsuits which, I’m convinced, could only happen here. I suppose Britain, Australia, Canada and the EU might have sunk to this level by now, but somehow I think that these lawsuits have a particularly American flavor to them. One disclaimer. If you’re a lawyer and reading this, ask yourself if you would take these cases. If not, I respect you for it. There are plenty of lawyers who are fed up with frivolous, stupid lawsuits, and you guys should get more acclaim. As I discuss these cases, I’ll try to point out the good guys amongst the legal eagles.

Case No. 1:

Woman Sues Little League Pitcher

The story’s being reprinted all over the place thanks to the Associated Press’s distribution. Since I’m not sure what copyright laws are at play for any given site, I’ll summarize, you research. Elizabeth Lloyd is suing now thirteen-year-old Matthew Migliaccio. She claims that Migliaccio, who was aiding a pitcher at the time, threw the ball recklessly and struck her, Lloyd, in the face. She’s suing him, the boy, for better than a hundred grand in actual damages plus, my favorite, pain and suffering. Funnily enough, her husband’s also suing. This happened two years ago, and the lawsuit info was published today by the AP. Now, here are some things that strike me, no pun intended, about this lawsuit. I wasn’t aware until today that you can legally sue a minor. If a minor commits a serious crime, you have to get special dispensations from the courts to try him as an adult. Not here, apparently. Suing a thirteen-year-old, let alone suing him for something that happened when he was eleven no less? I can’t say I would have thought of it. Did he vandalize her house and brake all her windows? No. Did he kill her pet snake? No. The kid threw a baseball at a little league warm-up, people. If I sound pissed, it’s because I am.

I take my hat off to Anthony Pagano, a lawyer for the family of the child. He calls the suit frivolous and without merit, and he goes on to say that it’s disgusting, his word, that you can sue somebody for something and have it get this far. I would like to say that this suit will be thrown out and that Lloyd and her husband will be tossed out of court on their … ears. But unfortunately, that may not be the case. Yes, it’s a perfectly legal and prosecutable lawsuit. It’s up to a judge to determine whether the Lloyds have a case.

Cases No. 2 and 3:

McDonalds?

These are cases we’ve been hearing about for years, but it’s interesting to look at them. In 1992, Stella Liebeck spilled some coffee down herself as she was trying to add sugar to it while sitting in her nephew’s car. Did it hurt? Well, have you ever spilled a whole cup of coffee all over yourself after it comes fresh from the coffee pot? If you have, you’ll probably answer ‘yes’ to my question. No one’s saying it didn’t hurt like hell. Is McDonalds responsible? Is it their problem? She seemed to think so. A jury agreed and awarded her a sizable chunk in damages, both actual and punitive. The case was later settled for an undisclosed figure. Nowadays if you buy a cup of coffee from McDonald’s, they actually tell you that it’s going to be hot. I learned after wisecracking about that at one location that many franchises have elected to include a verbal warning along with the label on the cup. Thanks, Stella. Now I know my coffee’s truly hot.

Here’s another McDonald’s case we all know about. Remember when you could get a supersized order of fries? Yes, I know they’re unhealthy. If you want healthy food, don’t order fries at all. The point is that you could, once upon a time, supersize your meal. It was a treat to be able to do that. Those days are over. You haven’t been asked if you wanted that supersized since 2004. The case that seems to have started it involved two New York teens who tried to claim that their obesity and diabetes was McDonald’s fault. Here is one instance where the justice system worked, because the judge tossed the case. As that venerable jurist rightly pointed out, you don’t have to eat there. You choose to. Yet, I’d say the girls actually won. Following the 2003 case and Morgan Spurlock’s 2004 documentary, “Supersize Me,” in which he claims that this case inspired his film, supersizing disappeared. Does that mean that the New York teens won in spite of losing in court? I’d say so. So, is fast food bad for you? Of course. Should you consume it regularly without exercising as Spurlock does in his film? No. Is the company to blame if you’re irresponsible with your diet and put on the pounds? Speaking as someone who used to weigh close to 300 pounds, I say no. The fact that coffee is hot or that fast food is bad for you is nothing new, common sensical, and should prevent, not encourage, the waste of public money incurred when idiots take McDonald’s to court. Then again, this is America I’m living in.

Case No. 4:

A Few Too Many?

In December 1992, Karen Norman, aged twenty-three, got behind the wheel of her Honda and took off. Unfortunately, Karen was drunk, her blood alcohol level being 0.17 when she was found. For those of you who don’t know about BAC, that’s pretty high. She backed her car off a boat ramp and into Galveston Bay and drowned because she couldn’t unfasten her seatbelt using the emergency release. Her passenger wasn’t buckled in and so escaped the sinking car. This is the only case involving a death that I’m going to deal with. It gets interesting, because Norman’s parents sued Honda. Their claim, as I take it from available records, was that her seatbelt, not her judgment, was defective. The jury actually awarded damages in the case. It took an appeals court ruling to reverse the decision. As far as I can determine, that ended it.

It’s harder for me to be as critical here because someone did, in fact, die. Not impossible though. Who’s fault is it if I drink myself into oblivion and then try driving? You can sue a bartender who failed to cut me off. You can sue a liquor maker who put “too much” alcohol in their product which led to my drunken spree. Apparently, you can even sue the maker of my car if I drop it into the ocean and can’t get out, even though I’ve had double the legal limit and had no business behind the wheel. It’s revenge, not to put too fine a point on it. A tragedy happened, and someone has to pay. That’s how the Normans seem to have seen it. The jury saw it that way too. Not the appeals court.

I don’t know anything about tort reform. I’m not John Grisham and I’m not F. Lee Bailey. Still, what does it say about the practice of law that lawyers take on these cases? You can file a suit yourself without a lawyer, though almost no one does. Why don’t we hear more stories about lawyers and their clients getting slapped with thirty-day jail sentences for wasting a court’s time? I promise you, if a lawyer, hungry for money, knew that he could face a short jail term and a review of his license for filing frivolous lawsuits, you’d see a sharp dip in the numbers of cases like these.

These cases are, as I said before, a mere sampling. I found dozens like them. It could be that there are penalties on the books for frivolous and stupid lawsuits, but you don’t hear about them, and the legal community seems to be unaffected by them. All that tells me is that whatever those penalties are, they’re not stiff enough and/or are not enforced often enough to make them effective. Hence the lawyer jokes. I have my favorites, but I won’t quote them here. Have a good one.

The Language of Abortion, Part III

            Hello again. The month of May seems to be my blog posting period, I suppose. Truthfully, I would like to write more, and one thing I’ve discovered is that more people read if you write consistently and  frequently. Well enough. I would add that you should only write consistently and frequently if you also have something to say. I haven’t discussed abortion in a while. In fact, it’s been three months to the day since my last posting on this subject, but more material has come to my attention regarding the language and arguments surrounding abortion.

            Today, I want to consider the growing consistency of pro-choice arguments. There is certain language surrounding our laws that alarms me. Consider:  you’ve heard of a ‘wrongful death’ lawsuit, I’m sure. Basically, that’s a legal action where you argue that someone else’s actions or neglect resulted in a death. This sort of suit is usually, though not always, brought about against doctors, and we can easily understand why. If a doctor prescribes the wrong medications after surgery and it kills you, your family is naturally upset and wants some sort of payback from the hospital. While there’s debate on the types and degrees of wrongful death suits that are available, I think most of us can understand what drives someone to bring that sort of action against a hospital or against a particular doctor.

            How many of you, by contrast, know what a ‘wrongful birth’ lawsuit is? I’m not being sarcastic and I’m not making this up. There really is such a thing, and the more I think about it, the more alarmed and disgusted I become both as a Christian and as a person that might’ve been a victim if I’d been born to different parents. A wrongful birth lawsuit is arguable if you can claim that:  (A). The doctor failed to correctly perform certain prenatal tests or to inform you that your child stands a good chance of being born with congenital birth defects; (B). you’ve been burdened with a large amount of unforeseen financial expenses because of your child’s birth with defects; and (C). that you would have aborted the child if you’d known about the child’s birth defects. There’s a good legal definition and some case examples in the Free Online Law Dictionary.  http://legal-dictionary.thefreedictionary.com/Wrongful+Birth.

            On the theoretical level, lawsuits like this are merely a natural outgrowth of both legalized abortion and of more comprehensive genetic testing. After all, you wouldn’t have been able to make this claim in a court of law before 1973, because until abortion was recognized by the supreme court in Roe v. Wade, it was illegal. So you didn’t have the option of arguing that you would have aborted your child if only you’d known. The other half of that is our more advanced knowledge of genetics and our technologies for genetic testing. After all, without the ability to accurately diagnose both current and likely future genetic difficulties, you wouldn’t be able to make this claim either. In 2012, though, our knowledge of and our ability to test for latent or present genetic defects are improving all the time. Now, this is not going to be a philippic against the supreme court or against genetics technology. I just want to point out that those two things together make cases and issues like the ones I’m going to talk about possible in the first place.

            No one will deny that the law is convoluted and that lawyers’ perspectives don’t represent most of us in our views. So as long as I was talking about mere points of law, you might have been able to wave your hand in dismissal and go, “that’s lawyers for you.” As an aside, my apologies to my lawyer friends out there, but that profession isn’t highly esteemed for some understandable reasons. Back to the main point. We’re not just talking about theoretical points of civil law. Parents have actually made these arguments. I want to highlight a couple of cases before sharing my thoughts on this new consistency in pro-abortion thought.

            First case. In 2002, Daniel and Amara Estrada had a son, Aiden. Aiden was born with Smith-Lemli-Opitz syndrome, a genetic abnormality that can result in anything from mild mental retardation to profound mental impairments and malformed body parts and organs. It’s a disorder with a wide range of symptoms. In any case, the Estradas’ doctor didn’t catch this possibility until after Aiden’s birth, but he told them it wouldn’t happen again. So in 2004, the Estradas gave birth to Caleb. As it happened, Caleb also turned out to have SLO syndrome. The Estradas sued their doctor and the University of South Florida and won. It took an act of the Florida legislature in March of 2010 to actually get the Estradas their payout, an amount totaling over twenty-five million dollars. More information is available here.  http://www.genomicslawreport.com/index.php/2010/08/17/resolution-in-florida-wrongful-birth-case/

            Now then, in the Estrada family’s defense I do not see that they ever claimed that they would have aborted their first or their second child if they had been properly informed of the children’s genetic abnormalities. I still don’t know what I think of suing under those circumstances. Though as far as I can determine, they sued specifically because of the errors made by the doctors on-hand. The reason this case made it into my blog post is that the Estradas had to utilize Florida’s wrongful birth legal framework to bring this action against USF at all. In 2007, Florida State Senator Victor Crist acknowledged the scary slippery slope that this legal action could set in America, “In the 15 years I’ve been in the Legislature, I haven’t seen that kind of issue. This has a potential moral question that could become a potential political issue. I don’t know what the Legislature will do with that.”

            Second case. This is the case that inspired this post, and it makes me angry as well as scared. I’ve known about it since it made the news two months ago, but now it’s time to discuss it. Arial and Deborah Levy of Portland gave birth to their daughter Kalanit in June of 2007. Kalanit is the Levys’ third child and their only daughter up to that point. I don’t think they’ve had any children since, but I don’t know that. Kalanit was born with Down syndrome, a fact that previous genetic testing didn’t turn up. What makes this case different from the Estradas’ case is that in their suit against Legacy Health Systems of Portland, the Levys actually claim that they would have aborted their daughter if they’d known she would have Down syndrome:  http://www.oregonlive.com/portland/index.ssf/2012/03/portland_couple_sues_legacy_he.html. In March of this year, the jury awarded the Levy family around three million in damages to care for this child.

            This family has taken a firestorm of criticism because of their legal action up to and including death threats. I don’t condone death threats or violence, but I understand the public outcry and the anger. Remember, they didn’t just claim that the doctors screwed up. The doctors might or might not have. I don’t know about the ins and outs of genetic testing or the error rate of the tests they had done. They actually claimed that they would have aborted their child—that means killed if you’re not paying attention—if they had known their daughter was going to have Down syndrome, and that, not the malpractice angle, is what has people up in arms over the case.

            Before we move on, I have to say that I could have been a victim. If I had been born to these parents and had genetic testing turned up anything funky, or even if they’d detected physical abnormalities that would have led to my blindness, I might never have been born. That’s scary. I was outraged along with the rest of us. What angered me most was the family lawyer’s claim that the Levys love their daughter very very much. Sorry, but suing a hospital because you would rather have aborted your child does not constitute an act of love. However, and here we reach the point most relevant to conservative Christians who want to throw stones, we are still called on to love and to pray for the repentance of the Levys. I’m reminded of Little Finn, a Down syndrome child in one of Randy Alcorn’s novels. One day, the Levy’s will have to answer to that child and to God about the unworthy motives that led to this legal action. I don’t envy them that. Meanwhile, death threats and fire and brimstone sermons aren’t helping us or them. Righteous anger is one thing, but we must move beyond that if the Christian community is to serve the Levys at all now. Having said that, let’s get back to the issue of abortion.

            Let’s get away from legal cases now. As another blogger pointed out, cases like these mark a potentially broader shift in the abortion debate. It’s a particularly twenty-first-century development as well. My last two postings on the language of abortion argued that we often use language to conceal and soften our intentions. Calling a baby ‘tissue’ or using language such as ‘terminate the pregnancy’ are examples of such vague language, but what happens when people come face to face in linguistic terms with what they’re doing? Well, as Randy Alcorn’s son-in-law properly points out, they either stop what they’re doing or they harden their consciences still further. Let’s look at the second of those possibilities.

            You use words like ‘terminate’ or ‘rights’ or ‘tissue’ to make the topic less divisive, more emotionally disconnected from the participants in the conversation. Yet, what is at play when you make statements like those in this Slate Magazine article from February 27. It’s written largely in the mother’s own words, and I’m going to refer to it heavily, so have a look. http://www.slate.com/articles/double_x/doublex/2012/02/rick_santorum_and_prenatal_testing_i_would_have_saved_my_son_from_his_suffering_.html When Rick Santorum was contending for the republican presidential nomination, he made no secret of his opposition to certain kinds of prenatal testing, arguing that those tests led to increased abortions, and abortion is something he opposes. Ok, I have nothing to say about his point and whether or not genetic testing leads to abortion. What concerns me here is one very vehement response he received as a result of that stance. Now, Emily Rapp writes intelligently, articulately and at length. She uses language and terminology aimed at the well-educated and well-read. This is not an unlettered diatribe. She can’t be accused of not having thought this through. For all of those reasons, the problem here is ever so much worse. That is to say, she knows exactly what she’s saying.

            Emily talks about her two-year-old son, Ronan. Ronan has Tay-Sachs disease, a genetic disorder that has quite a number of severe symptoms and that leads to an early death for just about anyone who has it. It’s not pleasant for anyone involved including both the parents and the children. It’s terrible, painful and heart-rending. I will face up to those facts right now. I understand that Ronan will not live long and I agree that his quality of life is, by human standards, abysmal. I don’t envy Emily for everything she must be going through watching Ronan suffer, and my heart goes out to her as she deals with this tragic situation.

            What hurts me, though, is her chosen response to it. She doesn’t ask God, “why did you let this happen to me?” That’s an understandable and frequently posed question. Job asked it. We all do. To ask God why he allows something to happen, for all that God is God and we don’t know why he does most of what he does, this is an understandable question and it has one thing going for it. The very question acknowledges that God is in control and that he has a reason for what he permits. The atheist and agnostic version of this question would be, “if there is a God, why would he allow this to happen?” Even that form of the question admits of a discussion about God and his divinity. Emily doesn’t ask either question. In fact, she asks no questions at all. I could wish she would ask questions. Instead, she makes statements like this one:  “I would have found out what the disease meant for my then unborn child; I would have talked to parents who are raising (and burying) children with this disease, and then I would have had an abortion. Without question and without regret, although this would have been a different kind of loss to mourn and would by no means have been a cavalier or uncomplicated, heartless decision. I'm so grateful that Ronan is my child. I also wish he'd never been born; no person should suffer in this way—daily seizures, blindness, lack of movement, inability to swallow, a devastated brain—with no hope for a cure. Both of these statements are categorically true; neither one is mutually exclusive.”

            When she talks about her statements not being mutually exclusive, Emily means that she doesn’t see contradictions in the statements, “I’m so grateful that Ronan is my child,” and, “I also wish he’d never been born.” Well, as a linguist who is trained in philosophy and logic, I first want to say that I do perceive a contradiction. I do not see how both statements can be true. If the first is true, that she’s grateful for her son, I don’t see the second as being possible. Regret his suffering? Yes. Regret her own sufferings as his mother and an observer of this terrible disease? Absolutely. Wish he’d never been born? … No. Put the other way around, if, as is clear from her extended article, Emily believes it would have been better to abort—again that means kill—her son before he was born, then on what grounds does she make the statement, “I’m so grateful that Ronan is my child.” What, exactly, are you grateful for? That’s my question here. I want a list. I have a list of the reasons she wishes he hadn’t been born, but again as a philosophizing linguist, I say that the first statement about being grateful for her son is wholly unsupported in this long lament. Let’s go on.

            In another section of her discussion, Emily says of her own birth as a person with a disability:  “My mom did not have a choice about terminating her pregnancy, although when I was born and she was told that I might be retarded, that I might never walk, and that given these possibilities she might want to consider institutionalizing me, she probably wished she'd had the choice.” She probably wished she’d had the choice? That’s very presumptuous of her to say and possibly very hurtful from her own mother’s point-of-view. Did her mother tell her that? I doubt it. If she had, the word ‘probably’ wouldn’t have been in that sentence. What is likelier, if we’re going to deal with probabilities, is that her mother doesn’t or didn’t think of the question in Emily’s terms and that Emily is projecting her own disregard for life—because disregard for life is what’s at the bottom of this whole discussion here in the twenty-first century—backwards onto her mother’s own situation

            Now, I realize that saying that someone or that many someones display a disregard for human life is a very serious statement. However, such a disregard for life is at the bottom of the new shifts in the abortion debate and so I will endeavor to prove it. At the close of her article, Emily Rapp has this to say:  “Santorum believes that all life is inherently valuable, no matter how compromised or of what limited quality; that is one view. I believe that we need a more nuanced discussion about what quality of life is, and that it should be a woman's right to choose to terminate a pregnancy when the path of her child’s life is as compromised—and as terrible—as my son’s.”

            Let me put this into plain English. Emily Rapp’s considered opinion is that a woman should have the right to decide whether her child lives or dies based on what she, the mother, feels would be that child’s quality of life. She talks elsewhere about women having reproductive freedom and the right to decide what to do with their own bodies. Second point first, she does have that freedom. Outside of rape and incest, sex is a choice for both a man and a woman. You can choose to have it … or else not. But when a new life is conceived, we’re not just talking about the mother’s body anymore. I’ve already spoken at length about this in the first blog posting devoted to this subject. The baby is not the mother and his body is not her body, so enough of this, “it’s my body,” rhetoric. It’s rhetorically misleading and biologically untrue.

            As to what Emily says in the quote above, it goes beyond the traditional “my body, my choice” rhetoric. Emily freely admits that we’re dealing with another life. She’s not trying to argue that Ronan is part of her own body, though her  article is generally couched in those terms. What she’s actually saying here is that she, Emily, should have the power of life or death over Ronan and that she should be free to choose death for him. In fact, she comes out and says that she would have chosen death for him if she’d known about his condition.

            Is it just me? Am I the only one scared by the shifts in the abortion discussion? Suppose I was conceived today. Suppose the doctors told my mother that I had a whole slew of physical defects that might crop up and that it’d be best to abort me. As it happens, I was born with a whole slew of physical complications. I had every organ system in my body shut down at one time or another. I was given less than a day to live at one point. I had a hole in my heart when I was born. No doctor at my birth or even before it had any reason whatever to suppose that I would live. None. And I was born a decade later than Emily Rapp, remember. So according to today’s thinking, my mother could abort me and justify it by saying, “Brad would have had a terribly poor quality of life. I didn’t want him to suffer.” Well as it happens, the only lingering physical consequence from that tempestuous few months of my mother’s pregnancy turns out to be total physical blindness. Thirty years later, I’m hard pressed to complain.

            Emily asks for a more nuanced discussion. More nuanced than Rick Santorum’s idea that all human life has inherent value. The only real way to nuance that would be to say that all human life has inherent value, but some human lives are inherently more valuable than others. And, Emily, why are we just restricting this to physical defects? Should we agree that a mother on welfare should be free to decide not to raise her child in poverty and so he or she gets aborted? Or should we perhaps say that if I don’t want to raise my child in the lower middle class, I should have an abortion? Maybe we could narrow this down further. Crap, what if I live in south central L.A? Supposing I don’t want a child of mine to go to these schools or be exposed to these gangs, but I can’t leave L.A. Maybe I should have an abortion and just reconceive later on when I’ve moved to Seattle. I’m not being outrageous or exaggerating her point. I’m merely offering the nuances that Emily Rapp asks for when she insists on a more complicated view about quality of life and abortion.

            When you open the door that Emily and people like her want opened, the door behind which quality of life is freely and openly used to justify abortion in the most straightforward of language, you get another word that goes beyond abortion. That word, my friends, is ‘eugenics.’ http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/eugenics Eugenics is the study or practice of improving the human population by selectively weeding out undesirable traits e.g. not allowing a child with a potential or actual genetic defect to be born, lest they pass it on. Or not being allowed to conceive because you’re a carrier. When we get to a point that genetic testing is used solely to determine whether or not to have abortions—and that’s not very far off—then we will be practicing a grassroots form of eugenics. We have all but eroded moral objections to abortion. The legal cases and the Slate article above merely showcase the extent to which we as Americans have stopped thinking about abortion as something you ought to do or ought not to do, and started thinking of it in its most utilitarian terms, “Do I want to raise this child? Should this child be allowed to live given these problems?”

            Let me leave you with a futuristic situation. Supposing I’d been born twenty years from now. Suppose further, let’s say fifty years from now when I would be 30, that I was dating a woman and I asked her to marry me. Suppose finally, that she, being in love with me and finding me in every way suitable, she said sure. Only thing is, would I mind getting a genetic test. We do the test, and I show up as a carrier of an obscure ailment that I might pass along to a child. Supposing then she decides not to marry me based on this genetic test. Or as an alternative, supposing she does marry me anyway. Then she gets a genetic scan done and I come home to hear, “Well, I had to terminate today.” When I ask why, she might say, “Well, honey, it’s that thing on your thirty-second chromosome. Well they said our baby might develop it when he’s forty. I didn’t want that! You wouldn’t either, would you?”

            You know the worst part of that scenario, both of those scenarios? We don’t have to wait fifty years for either of those things to happen. They could happen today. We’ve got the technology and there are such things as genetic councilors. We’re well on our way to having the mindset too.

            When you stop thinking that all life is inherently valuable, you begin deciding for yourself which lives, whose lives, are valuable and whose are less so. What is  the result? The results are abortion based on genetic testing and eugenics-like thinking. Proverbs 21:2 tells us, “Every way of a man is right in his own eyes.” There’s a second half to that verse, but this half contains the message we need to hear. Emily Rapp uses words like ‘moral’ and ‘value’ in her piece. While I don’t doubt her sincerity, she doesn’t use the word ‘God’ even once. When you eliminate God as the source and standard for your value judgments, that doesn’t mean you’re incapable of making what you perceive to be value judgments. Just like if you decide not to spend money issued by the treasury, that doesn’t stop you from printing your own money and spending it if you can get away with it. But the fact that you can make your own money doesn’t include with it the idea that you ought to, nor does it invalidate legal money. Similarly, the fact that you can form opinions about moral standards on your own strength of intellect doesn’t make those standards right. Just the opposite, in fact.

            Last but not least, why does God make—or allow to be made—children with physical defects? Tough question. I don’t claim to have the answers. Here’s one possibility though. Is it possible that God allows a child with Down syndrome to come into the world so that the child might be instructive to the parents? Is it possible that Emily was gifted with Ronan, not that she might bemoan his fate, but that she might learn grace, patience, unconditional love and charity from him? No, unconditional love does not entail wishing your child had never been born. It excludes that wish, actually. I don’t know why Ronan or Kalanit are here. Jesus won’t ever answer that one for me. Like Aslan, he tends to tell people no stories but their own. But it is possible. Finally, I will tell you what I do know. I know that God does indeed allow children with physical defects to come into the world. I leave you with this thought:  “But Moses said to the Lord, “Oh, my Lord, I am not eloquent, either in the past or since you have spoken to your servant, but I am slow of speech and of tongue.” Then the Lord said to him, “Who has made man's mouth? Who makes him mute, or deaf, or seeing, or blind? Is it not I, the Lord? Now therefore go, and I will be with your mouth and teach you what you shall speak (Exodus 4:10-12).