The Debates

What I want to talk about is the Presidential debates tomorrow nigh but first I'd like to digress back to last Friday. I'm not sure if I gracelessly stumbled over some unwritten rule of on-line educate (if I did I'm sorry) or if I unfortunately became a target of interest of somebody who felt that this blog was so offensive that it needed to be shut down. One of my tech friends laughed and said it was a right of passage and most small blogs has had this happen at least once.

People seem to be very edgy these days. These things go in cycles depending on the economy and the political climate. It reminds me of once when I was in New York City. In lower Manhattan there would be hired men handing out advertisements for neighborhood businesses. Almost all of these men represented the very bottom of the city's economy and the majority of pedestrians would walk right by. Except for one man in a suit, who started to curse and scream, and then hit the guy who was handing out the flyers.

Back then New York City was on the verge of bankruptcy, the shine was definitively off the Big Apple and the pundits of that time seriously discussed the end of big cities. As bad as things were I still couldn't understand the reasoning behind hitting a man for doing something as innocuous as passing out advertisements and trying to scrape out a living?

So tomorrow night is the Second Presidential Debate. It's also the anniversary of the founding of Plan Parenthood, that happen 96 years ago and many of the controversies then are still with us now. I don't think the candidates will really talk much about women's rights. Probably there will be little, if any, real policy analysis, it will be more about body language, confidence and the effect on the polling numbers.

Women in the United States had secured the right to vote less than a 100 years ago. Our Constitution still does not have a Equal Rights Amendment -thought as a bit trivia when the United States occupied Japan after World War 2,  the Japanese had to include a clause ending all discrimination based on gender and guarantee the same rights to women as to men. An equal rights amendment was good enough for the Japanese in 1945 but still not good enough for American women.

Some people would like to portray what had happened to Malala Yousafzai as an act of Muslim terrorism. It was an act of terrorism but it's potentially possible in every community that feels women can not make their own decisions. -Or that women are property. Or a thing of potential family shame until she is married. Or need to be covered, controlled and completely protected from the world.   

The education women is not only an issue of fairness but humanity's survival might depend on it. Statistically the more education a woman has the fewer child she'll give birth to. The children she does have will be healthier and better prepared for school and life. The growth of education for women in China popularized the One Child Policy to the point were majority for families completely support it. What does this mean for the rest of the world? -China will stabilize its population growth by mid-century. We have to ask can this planet feed eight billion people? What happens when there is ten billion people? And if the population should grow beyond that -are we looking a Malthusian crash?

Usually I get to meet a wide range of people on any given day. Last weekend I helped one friend clean out his old studio. He is very conservative Christian with a long history in both mainstream and religious entertainment. The camera equipment he gave me went to another fellow who is as "middle of the road" as you can get. Both are good men but both live in own exclusive worlds.

After tomorrow's debates it will interesting if anything will change. These days the fault lines are sharp and
people not only inhabit their own exclusive worlds but those worlds have their own history, facts and coded language.

Just two more bits of trivia. Planned Parenthood has received Federal money since 1970 when President Richard Nixon signed the Family Planning and Population Research Act. And as one of his first acts as Governor of California in 1967 Ronald Reagan signed the Therapeutic Abortion Act which lead the way to Roe verses Wade.  

As one last I thought I'd ad this Youtube video of an old favorite song. The sound quality is only fair and the video is cute and kind of laughable -but the song itself is excellent. The artist is Dan Bern and you can find out more about him at danbern.com