A Mile Wide, An Inch Deep

Lately there’s been this drip-drip-drip of posts in my newsfeed that are — let’s be honest — rooted in racism. The slanted news articles, you know the ones. This one time a black person benefited at the expense of a white person, evidence of widespread “reverse racism!” Drip. This one black cop shot an unarmed white man but nobody cares because white people are discriminated against! Drip. A black person somewhere did something bad therefore it’s reasonable to fear all black people everywhere! Drip. Or the memes about black rioting. Drip. Or the absurdly emotional defenses of all police officer actions, even the ones that are demonstrably inexcusable. Drip. Drip. Drip. Drip. They aren’t posted by people who think of themselves as racists or who condone explicit racism, but they do reveal an inexcusable myopia about the biases we all have and a disturbing lack of empathy for people of color. Although I have never been one to unfriend people who disagree with my world vi

As an atheist, I say "Merry Christmas" to everyone because I want to perpetuate the idea that Christmas is a non-Christian secular American holiday equally applicable to members of all faiths. Incidentally, that reasoning is exactly why it was Christians who once preferred the greeting "Happy Holidays" so as to preserve the religious meaning of Christmas. The so-called "war on Christmas" is, of course, nothing more than a ratings-driven push to gin up outrage, hatred, and   division -- which is pretty antithetical to the values of Christmas, whether it's my secular version or a follower of Jesus Christ's religious version. But this Christmas remember that when you insist on saying "Merry Christmas" to someone regardless of his or her religious beliefs, you are participating in my godless heathen agenda! Merry Christmas to all, and to all a goodnight!

Knowing that I will soon be leaving Congress, I made this flowchart today to help my colleagues predict in my absence whether or not Speaker Boehner has the votes necessary to pass any given bill. The flowchart was right during Boehner's "Plan B" tax proposal in 2012, right again during the battle over the Violence Against Women Act reauthorization, right again during the 2013 shutdown, right during the farm bill debate, right during the transportation spending bill, right during... Well, you get the idea. UPDATE: The flowchart also correctly predicted the outcome of the DHS funding showdown in spring 2015 over the president's immigration executive orders. If House Republicans could have controlled themselves and just gone after the 2014 EO (DAPA) related to the parents of legal residents, they could probably have peeled off a number of mushy Democrats. But they couldn't resist the siren call of full crazy and passed a funding bill that also invalidated t

In response to the grand jury announcement in Ferguson, a (white) neighbor posted a meme, “Remember when white people rioted after the OJ Simpson verdict? Me either.” I’ve written extensively here about why memes (from any ideological bent) ruin thoughtful political discourse. Most of the time, I see little value in rebutting the specifics of a meme itself and counsel people (yes, you, Dad!) not to get angry at the unfairness of the meme but to instead highlight its absurdities. In this case, I responded with “No, but I do remember the times that white people rioted over football coaches and pumpkins.” But after some thought, I’ve decided the specifics of this particular meme are worth responding to after all. White people might have been disgusted by the OJ Simpson verdict – another rich and powerful celebrity gets away with murder – but we weren’t personally affected by it. If anyone would have been out in the streets rioting, it would have been victims of domestic violence who on

©Jesse Christopherson, 2014

For the first time in over a decade I am experiencing a federal election more like a member of the general public than a congressional staffer. Long-time friends of this page know that by now I should have been bombarding them with my (in)famously long posts on policy positions or political shenanigans. Instead I'm all carpenter bee photos and mental health introspection. Maybe I'm tapped out. By 2006, I was already a Hill staffer and Jesse too. We volunteered on Jim Webb's successful campaign to take down George "macacca" Allen. Then I flew to Utah for the final weeks of my then-boss's similarly successful reelection campaign. I hate retail politicking but we all sensed it was going to be a wave year and being so involved -- for my home state, no less! -- was exciting. With the door-knocking help of my kid brother, Democrats took back the U.S. Congress. In 2008, I was the financial services staffer working for my current boss, breathlessly listening on the ph

When life confronts us with evidence that there is a gap between who we perceive ourselves to be and who we really are, we have three possible choices: 1- change who we are to match our perceptions, 2- change our perceptions to match who we are, 3- deny there's a conflict.  I have, at various times, tried all three strategies.

Snap judgments walking home from the metro: Black man = bad. Latino man = bad. White man = bad. Black man in a suit = good. Black person of indeterminate gender carrying Hello Kitty backpack = very, very good. Yes, this is the person I will be keeping up with on the path!

Sitting on the beach at the Ritz Carlton discussing with Jesse the futility of saving for the boys' college, I'm reminded again of the need for a "confiscatory" top marginal tax rate. (The Ritz plays no small part in my thinking.) What? I'm going to save and save so that university presidents can collectively raise tuition 1,200% over three decades and reward themselves with multimillion dollar salaries? Truly, I'd be more inclined if it all didn't seem so laughably impossible to think we could ever put aside enough to keep up with the tuition explosion. But if there's a solution, it's not in more federal grants to students or cheaper loans -- wherein I agree with my conservative brethren that federal policies have helped enable the universities. It's in getting at the root cause of the problem. Then Jesse alludes to the old blackmail race-to-the-top (or bottom) dilemma that results in Wall Street CEOs getting 6-figure bonuses while taking

Democratic control of Congress, 2007-2010 (two years with Pres. Bush and two with Pres. Obama), was among the most productive in US history. As a staffer, it left me exhausted but with a tremendous feeling of accomplishment, like when a burst of energy lets you get through a 5-page list of household to-do items you've been putting off for months. In contrast, the last four years of Republican control of the House, 2011-2014, have been like those days where you can't even buy bread -- just about the most basic act of adulthood -- without drama because your 4-year-old has taken off his shoes and is lying in the aisle screaming for candy. Every single act of governing has been a struggle and a crisis, no matter how elemental or routine. I'm left feeling exhausted, but with nothing accomplished, because I've been forced to use up all of my energy just passing a straight funding bill, the household equivalent of putting on socks. Will next Congress under a united Republ

The theft of Jennifer Lawrence and other celebrities’ personal photos has prompted a now-predictable online discussion about victim-blaming, with self-appointed moralists condemning Lawrence for taking nude or sexually-explicit pictures in the first place and her defenders objecting to any discussion of taking reasonable precautions against becoming a victim. It’s a repeat of the societal conversations we have around rape, and while I get it, it wears me down. The Huffington Post posted a tweet from Farhad Manjoo , “I’ve never heard anyone respond to financial hacking by saying, Just don’t use online banking. That’s what you get for using credit cards.” But the truth is that we blame victims—of crime, of misfortune—all the time, blaming them for risky behavior, for bad one-off decisions, even as we ignore how many risks we take ourselves, or how many of our own stupid decisions turn out well when they might just as easily have been deadly. And here’s a test case: If you hear that s

James comes into kindergarten with a very different skill set than most of his peers at our neighborhood school, a skill set that seems to hold a mirror up to our family, reflecting our generation, our economic class, our culture, even our personal quirks. He knows his letters, alphabet sounds, numbers, sight words. He knows every train part ever made, from the couplings to the traction rods, and can describe to you how steam and diesel engines differ in their production of energy. He knows every dinosaur ever discovered (or so it seems) and pronounces their names better than I do. He easily types "dinosaur" into the iPad, using it with better skill than most adults. But he can't write his name or put on his shoes and he will NOT draw. He's always had parents culturally willing and financially able to give him maximum attention, to read to him, to facilitate with books and videos and flashcards and toys and trips to far-flung museums his intellectual obsessions, but

For better or worse (and without my ever having been entirely cognizant of it until this moment), our little family has been largely free to operate autonomously for years, our schedules shaped (but not controlled) by the predictable waxes and wanes of Congress, but little else. And cantankerous Congress -- where nothing of importance happens before 10 am and the most critical votes each year aren't cast till after the bars are sweeping out their last diehards for the night -- has been a good fit for a family of committed night owls, heretics, and contrarians. Now the sweet lull of lazy August is interrupted by a new, unfathomable bureaucracy with its early-morning attendance, its authority figures of questionable English ("Ima?" I was tempted to ask the teacher of my child) who seem to radiate dislike for my son, its seemingly arbitrary rules, its totalitarian demands on time and financial resources. The "damned independent" streak noted (approvingly) by my

"I'm not normally a praying man, but if you're up there... please save me, Superman!" It's 5 am, I'm lying in my childhood bed in my childhood bedroom, staring up at the still-glowing stars I pasted on the ceiling some two decades before. My husband and sons don't arrive for hours, my brother not till the day after. It's feeling uncomfortably like it might really be 1992 again. I send my mom a text with a question for the coming day, figuring she'll see it in the morning morning. Instead there's a loud chime from the bedroom 12 feet from mine. "What's that?!" [alarmed!!] "It's Sarah!" [surprise and confusion!] "What did she say?!" [more evident confusion, processing concept of notes texted, not taped to the garage door! what is going on?!] "She wants to move the old furniture. ... THAT'S FINE, SARAH." [yelling as though I might be very, very far away instead of close enough to

My daily commute (on foot) is threatened far more often by cyclists paying no attention to pedestrians than by drivers. "Share the road" is not license to run red lights and stop signs and bulldoze through crosswalks. Those are there to keep pedestrians like me safe.