Rachel’s Musings

I just watched Waltz with Bashir. And I am under shock. How much human inflicted suffering! From the actual massacres to the post-traumatic stress syndrome of the soldiers involved. Lives destroyed. When I was a little kid, I supposedly swore that nothing like the Holocaust would ever happen again. Yet, where was I when those massacres happened? When did they even happen? I didn’t even know about them until this movie.

I started reading Peter Unger’s book “Living High and Letting Die.” It’s subtitle is “Our Illusion of Innocence.” He writes about children dying all over the world while we worry about the latest software upgrades or the coolest party to go to. There is so much more that we ignore and pretend to be innocent about. But what to do? What can we do in face of these massive inequalities, this disrespect of life – human and otherwise – for the profit of the few? How can we change all that and maybe safe the planet while we’re at it? It’s overwhelming to think about our global responsibility. Yet, it’s hard to deny, too, because everything we do, everything we buy, has an impact somewhere else. Sitting here at the computer typing has an impact. The energy it uses. The children who might’ve been involved in its assembly. It’s all interconnected; something we love to deny. Is that what we need to realize again? That we’re all interconnected? If I play music loudly, someone else will hear it? If I double-park someone else will have to drive around me? These are the little things where we ignore our interconnection but that’s where the realization has to start. We have to start somewhere. Buy local. Buy from non-chain stores. All that good stuff. But that’s not enough. We cannot hide behind our claim of innocence and deny interconnection world-wide. What massacres am I ignoring right now? And how do we get the masses to start waking up?

This week marks National Singles Week (aka Unmarried and Single Americans Week). I am busy preparing for an exam (read this if you don’t know why I am taking exams again), so I am going to have to defer to others for the data crunching and analysis. Fortunately, there is quite a bit out there even though lots of people don’t even know about USA Week (yet!).

The Census Bureau has compiled some important stats on the unmarried population in the US. We are now 95.9 million strong! That is 43% of the adult population in the US. Also, please check out the press release by the Council on Contemporary Families. (Hat tip to Bella DePaulo for these links).

Bella DePaulo kicks off the week with a quiz that takes on the cultural lag between our perceptions of single and unmarried people and our reality. Check it out! It’s rather enlightening.

And, of course, as I mentioned before, there is a blog crawl going on this year organized by Single Women Rule. (Okay, I have to add that I was rather disappointed with the first post: It talks about the dating experience of a single woman. Who cares! Single folks are not (just) about dating, in fact, many of us are single by choice and aren’t even interested in dating. See also number 10 on Bella’s quiz.)

So, go read while I study but most importantly: Enjoy your week!

Update on 9/25:
Bella DePaulo has compiled a list of the good, the bad, and the ugly coverage of National Singles Week. Some of that coverage is in the spirit of Tom Coleman’s original intend with the week: To raise awareness. But a lot of it has morphed into an extreme focus on dating… As if that’s all we’re interested in: to become unsingle…

Update on 9/26
The final blog crawl post is not about dating – it is about being single and happy. Check it out!

Single Women Rule is inaugurating the first annual blog crawl to celebrate this year’s National Singles’ Week. Although I am a tiny bit disappointed that my blog isn’t a part of it, we’ll be able to learn about some very cool blogs, which are much more active than mine and focus on anything single related (unlike my blog…).

Featured guest bloggers include Dr. Bella DePaulo, notable psychologist and author of Singled Out: How Singles Are Stereotyped, Stigmatized, and Ignored, and Still Live Happily Ever After; author of the novel The Divorce Party, Laura Dave; dating/relationship writer and author of The Real Reasons Men Commit, Kimberly Dawn Neumann, writer Simone Grant of Sex, Lies and Dating, dating coach Ronnie Ann Ryan of NeverTooLate.biz, and Maryanne Comaroto, author of Hindsight: What You Need to Know Before You Drop Your Drawers.

Hopefully, this will be a single-affirming blog crawl and not a crawl that affirms the idea that singles are only interested in dating type of crawl… DePaulo will be in the first camp; not sure sure about Neumann or Ryan. I guess we’ll just have to wait and read!

(Hats off and hat tip to crawl participants Onely!)

Finally, the first major protest against the cuts to the educational system in California. The UC faculty is walking out on September 24:

Under the cover of the summer months, UC administration has pushed through a program of tuition hikes, enrollment cuts, layoffs, furloughs, and increased class sizes that harms students and jeopardizes the livelihoods of the most vulnerable university employees. These decisions fundamentally compromise the mission of the University of California. They are complicit with the privatization of public education, and they have been made in a manner that flouts the principle of shared governance at the core of the UC faculty’s capacity to guide the future of the University in accordance with its mission.

On September 24, in solidarity with UC staff and students, faculty throughout the University of California system will walk out in defense of public education.

More info here.

At SF State, a solidarity event is planned as well:
WHAT: Speak Out (in solidarity with a one-day strike of students, staff and faculty at the UCs)
WHEN: Thursday, September 24th, at NOON
WHERE: Malcolm X Plaza
WHY: To protest yet another proposed hike in student tuition AND to mobilize students to prepare for an even greater strike next year

If you can’t make either but don’t like how California’s educational system is deteriorating, write to your representatives and the governor!

San Francisco State University, one of the important universities in the state of California, was closed yesterday and will be closed again on Tuesday. They just want more time off, right? Not exactly. These are forced times off affecting the quality of education (classes are cancelled) and endanger the university’s ability to retain good faculty (who’d want to stay at a place that forces unpaid vacation down your throat?!?).

I’ve decided that I will email my state reps on every furlough day that I don’t have classes. I’d like to encourage all fellow students to do the same! Maybe if we can make enough noise, we can actually reverse this ridiculous trend of mortgaging our future…

In general, furloughs are on the rise as Robert Reich points out: “At the same time, furloughs — requiring workers to take unpaid vacations — are on the rise: recent surveys show 17% of companies imposing them.”

Yet, the highest paid CEOs in 2008 forked in the money: Goldman Sachs ($42,946,801), American Express ($42,940,941) and Citigroup ($38,237,437). They alone could’ve closed the CSU budget gap with a pay cut. Well, okay, maybe not quite, the funding cut enacted by the California legislature and the governator was $584 million… Certainly they could’ve also used that money to prevent layoffs at their own companies. For example, the number of employees laid off by Citigroup in 2008 was 75,000. (See the most excellent report from the Institute for Policy Studies on “America’s Bailout Barons” for more information).

There is something seriously wrong with a society where CEOs make 319 times what the average worker makes; where education budgets are slashed forcing students and teachers to scramble to avoid the almost inevitable decrease in the quality of education. Instead of No Child Left Behind testing, education should be adequately funded – from kindergarten through grad school. If we’d curb the executive excesses, we would be able to prevent financial bubbles (and meltdowns) and adequately fund the future of our children. All of our children, not just the kids of the rich executives.

That’s what the sign read posted to a bulletin board at SF State. Intrigued, I stepped closer. After all, maybe someone was going to bust some internalized singlism that was causing people some emotional heartaches… Fat chance. The ad was from an MFA (marriage and family agreement?) who was going to help people find their One and Only. So, if you’re unhappily single, the only solution is to become unsingle? And that will automatically make you happy? How about deconstructing the social assumptions that underlie these assumptions because they are what makes many singles unhappy: You are nothing without a mate. You cannot possibly be happy without a mate. Or how about teaching people to be happy whether they are single or not? Developing self-acceptance no matter what our relationship status seems to be a much sounder long-term approach than desperately trying to find a match.