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Wild Indigenous Cab Ride, KevinAThompson
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Recently I was listening on public radio. The discussion was whether or not U.S. colleges or universities prepared their students for actual jobs in the workplace. There were two guests and two hosts. One of the guests was a far-left academic whose constant refrain was that U.S. capitalism wanted a stupid workforce, with only a narrowly-trained elite at the top to make decisions. Fortunately, the other three participants easily sidelined her far-left ideological idiocy, and spoke in more common-sense terms about how college graduates fare in the work place.
Why she was wrong:
The far-left academic who insisted that US colleges deliberately over-specialize their students was not dealing with reality. American colleges actually do less specialization than universities in Europe. In Germany, students are tracked into their career path in high school. In the Netherlands, what we know (in the USA) as graduate-level specialization begins in the freshman year of college.
Far from wanting rigid and narrow automatons, US institutions want people with wider experience and flexible minds. Take the military. Most US military officers do not come from the three big academies. In fact, most officers graduate from college in some other major, and then attend Officer's Candidate School, where they learn the ropes of military life. Another route is to join ROTC, major in something (possibly unrelated to the military, but useful to it, like medicine or law) and them become an officer to repay the expense of being educated. The once most popular major at West Point was history. Nowadays, its engineering.
Clearly, the military does not want narrow specialists.
Neither do many businesses. The other guests mentioned themselves or acquaintances who had graduated and entered a career path that they would have never imagined, and thrived in it.
An elder speaks:
I asked my mom about the same question: Do American colleges and universities prepare students for the workforce? She said it was better now than when she graduated from college in the 1950s. Mom said there weren't even that many majors offered. There were a few specialties, like engineering, which my Dad entered (He later designed part of the Apollo space ship, adn the first ink-jet printer). Most of their fellow students of color were liberal arts majors of some kind. A huge portion of them became teachers. My mom was a teacher and later retired from a computer company.
Presumably, a high number of white female college students became teachers or nurses. A higher proportion of the white males entered the law. Accounting majors had opportunities in banking, or maybe insurance. (My current insurance agent, a few years my senior, majored in English.)
In the 1950s, there were few specialized majors outside of medicine and the hard sciences. Newspapers hired English majors and trained them as reporters. IBM hired music majors to write computer programs, and hired farmer's sons, with their mechanical know-how, to design and work out the bugs (sometimes literally) of their huge electro-mechanical computers. There were no college programs in building or programming computers because there were still being invented. Many technicians had graduated from trade schools or learned skills in the military, other apprenticed on the job. Some of the IBM engineers in my home town ran farms part-time.
Job Fair Hell:
Still, even with the more specialized college majors, recent grads may have hard time landing a good job. Many college majors just don't translate into an immediate career track. If you have ever been to a college job fair, you often find the military has a table sometimes also the FBI recruiter is there, too. Teach for America will have a recruiter, who will offer you a chance to teach in some remote or underserved community and earn a teaching masters even if you did not major in education.
With the holder of your student loan requesting re-payment in a few months after graduation, this can be a stressful time for a recent graduate. Europeans don't go through this hassle. We Americans do. And somehow this makes us creative, resourceful and flexible. We specialize only when we need to, and this seems to work for us.
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My anthropology professor described zero-sum thinking as a trait of some peasant societies. He said Zero-Sum thinking works like this: if my neighbor has something I don't, then he is stealing from me. I saw this illustrated on the news in a story about a Russian peasant family who had their cow poisoned by neighbors jealous of their increased wealth. After that harsh lesson, the family invested in goats, which were small enough to keep in the house with them at night, protecting them from jealous neighbors.
But zero-sum thinking is not limited to impoverished peasants. Both the Right and the Left indulge in it and/or use zero-sum equations to mislead people. Some examples:
1. "Immigrants are taking jobs from us." This overlooks the immigrants working, and owning, businesses that cater only to immigrants, and therefore would not have even be created by the native-born workforce.
2. "Elvis Presley stole black people's culture." Elvis roamed Memphis clubs where African American musicians performed. Very few other Southern whites of the time would dream of doing this, and when he incorporated black music into his repertoire he exposed millions of white people to black musical forms they otherwise would not have heard. Elvis familiarized white people with black culture, making it easier for later black musicians to seem less alien or frightening. This was not lost on many Southern white supremacists, who openly stated their fear of white women being sexually corrupted by Elvis' version of what they called "ni***r music."
Also, Elvis' biggest hit "Don't Be Cruel", was written by Otis Blackwell, a black man from Brooklyn, who continued to get royalties from the song for 20 years after Elvis's death.
3. "Eminem is taking rap away from black people." Elvis redux. At the height of Eminem's popularity, my then teenage child noted that most of Eminem's white fans did not listen to other rappers or hip hop artists. If Eminem took business away from other other artists, it was white rock band's CD's which were not purchased because Eminem was chosen instead. Not only that, Eminem was "discovered" ( as in Columbus "discovering" America) and promoted by Dr. Dre, an African American hip hop producer, who presumably pocketed a share of Eminem's earnings.
4. "The women's struggles takes away from the black struggle." A frequent refrain in the Civil Rights and Black Power struggle, the assumption being that there was only so much social justice to go around, so it had to be rationed, like gasoline or commodity cheese.
It's not usually artists themselves who make the accusations of cultural theft. Artists understand that the free flow of creativity can not be contained in one skin color or ethnicity. Like water, creative juices must flow or they become stagnant. Politicians and demogogues, however, thrive on imagined encroachments on their community's supposed turf. There's only so much (take your pick--money, sex, music, dignity, tax revenue, etc.) to go around and those (immigrants, capitalists, etc.) are taking it from you.
Focusing on what others have can distract you from your own shortcomings. Perhaps the problem is not the evil of the other, but your own failure to think creatively about your situation, and change your own habits of thinking. Creativity comes from within and needs to by cultivated with some diligence.
Fertilize your own garden. You'll realize there is plenty of sunshine to go around.
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I'm back in the woods. I live in a clearing, with an emphasis on the "ing," because I'm still clearing each time I mow the lawn, keeping the woods from taking over the yard. The woods will take it back in a few seasons, as I've observed in other abandoned houses in my area, if I am not vigilant. The forest lets us stay here for a time, and eventually the forest will take it back.
The Garden
The corn, beans and squash are doing extremely well. After some slowness, the tomato plants are also doing well. Likewise, the pumpkins, but not so the sunflowers.
My Human Neighbors
Good blue collar folks.
My Other Neighbors
On walks with my toddler we helped a baby snapping turtle cross the road. Also saw a flock of crows chase a fox. A bear sampled the neighbors garbage. A few coyotes passed through the other night, just after hearing coyotes in a neighboring county attacked two children in two days in separate incidents.
My toddler knows to stop every now and then and listen to the birds.
The Town
Our town is fiercely anti-development. Only one strip mall, no rows of townhouse developments, minimum two-acre lots for each house. Most of the town is still woods. This is Appalachia, home of my ancestors.
Politically, about half Democrat and half Republican, Yin and yan, in balance.
Native Legacy
Pre-European this was the land of the Wappingers. Someone said I looked like a Wappinger, and thought like one, too. Possibly some long-ago connection with my family's treks up and down the spine of the Appalachian mountains.
The Woods
The woods are green and lush. Flowers make it aromatic.
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For most of its history, Christianity has been on the defensive. Yes, the defensive. The Jesus movement started as an outlaw movement within Judaism and was organized into a more formal structure by Saint Paul, but it remained an outlaw group until the Roman emperor Constantine made it the state religion.
But that good fortune did not last long. In 476 Rome collapsed. For the next thousand years, Islam grew much faster. Islam took over all of the former Roman Christian lands of North Africa. In east Africa, Ethiopia remained Christian in part due to its mountainous fortress of a homeland, while lands on either side of it became Muslim. The Christian Byzantine empire was whittled down to a shadow of its former self until all that was left was the city of Constantinople, which the Muslim Turks conquered in 1453.
The Turks also had long-term colonies in Bulgaria, the Balkans, Spain, Portugal and Italy. Islam conquered the Fertile Crescent, all of Persia, most of India and a good swath of what is now Indonesia. Muslims conquered or established cities in the regions bordering the Sahara, and most of the East African coast. Even the Mongols were unable to dislodge the Muslims as lords of the Indian Ocean.
In that same period (AD 476 to AD 1500) Christianity remained relatively isolated in feudal Europe. The Celts, Scandinavians and Slavs, who largely had never been under Roman control, were converted to either Roman Catholicism or Byzantine Greek Catholic Orthodoxy. That was the extent of Christian conquest for a thousand years.
The turning point was in 1492. The Catholic kingdoms of Castille and Leon drove the last of the Muslims from Spain. Then they sponsored Columbus, who had the good PR sense to advertise his findings in the Caribbean. Soon Spain, Portugal and later France, Britain, the Dutch and Danes got in on the act, sending African captives to the Americas, where slavery and disease conveniently opened lots of real estate for development. The kingdoms (some actually Queendoms) of Western Europe benefitted the most from the new Atlantic trade. Spain, Portugal, France and Britain became viable nation-states while their eastern neighbors, Italy and Germany, remained a collection of petty fiefdoms. Russia was still one large enslaved society of serfs until 1865. The Turks almost took Vienna as late as the 1600s, after the founding of the Massachusetts Bay colony. Yes, "Europe" was still under the threat of being colonized by Muslims even after the Thirteen Colonies were being formed.
I can hear Christianity's detractors blaming the faith for all the earthly evils of conquest and capitalism, but they have missed a vital point. The Christain West only got into that game as latecomers, but with flexiblity and a strong desire to prevent future conquest by the Turks resulted in an astounding success we now call Western Civilization.
What might this mean for us today?
For devout Christians the increasing attacks on our faith foretell an end to our cultures, but this stance often assumes that the recent triumph of the Christian West was typical and inevitable. It wasn't. Of the last two thousand years Christianity has spent only five hundred years in earthly triumph. We have still mostly been an outlaw religion, or a community in threat of conquest and enslavement by people more powerful. We also should not forget that our mother religion, Judaism, was also a religion of slaves, tribal nomads, and exiles for much of its history.
Look to the Tribal Peoples for Strength:
The British Isles were a tribal backwater in the eyes of the Romans. But it was Celtic tribesmen who converted the Scandinavians to the Roman Christianity by peaceful pursuasion. LIkewise, the tribal peoples of Africa and Latin America are a hotbed for the growth of Christianity. Mainstream Christianity has not even recognized that certain Indigenous religions, such as the Ghost Dance and Native American Church, had roots in Christian belief. How many know that the first meetings of the Cherokee Keetowah society were held in Baptist churches?
There are concerted efforts by some missionaries to not only translate the Bible into Indigenous languages, but to deliberately record the Good Book's stories into tribal tongues, so that Scripture can survive as tribal lore. You can listen to the actual recordings on /http//globalrecordings.net/ . These efforts have actually helped preserve Indigenous languages.
Mainstream Christianity, though, has to be ready for the new tribal church to be a little different from the one in the past. There are signs of this happening already. The current president of the Southern Baptist convention is a Lumbee Indian pastor. The Catholics are promoting the Mexican brown Virgin of Guadalupe in Africa as a push to encourage marriage and children. Recenlty, the Pope rescinded the order from the 1400s that allowed the enslavement of Africans and Indigenous Americans (North, South and Central) and the taking of their lands.
The Vatican, it seems, knows where its future lies.
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I have returned to the woods. A bear visited our neighbor's house. My garden is growing well, especially the Three Sisters section, where the 3 sisters of corn, beans and squash are complimenting each other well. The beans put valuable nitrogen into the soil via the nitrogen-fixing bacteria on their roots. That's why beans provide protein, and plants need nitrogen to produce protein molecules. Our ancestors knew about this and it works.
I stay away from politics in this blog, especially Indian Country politics, but I have a soft spot for the newspaper News From Indian Country (NFIC), which reviewed my novel and whose staff is a pleasure to work with. I'm feeling some guilt of reading their paper edition when the paper-less online version is available, but I'm old-fashioned and enjoy carrying NFIC with me. Plus, NFIC is the only paper or magazine I currently subscribe to. I have to sort and recycle much more junk mail that I don't even ask for.
I'm still waiting for the Big Paradigm Shift, when either Indigenous folks all get our act together, or when the non-Indigenous world gets the point that this consume-at-all-costs global culture is a dead end, or both. There are signs that this change may be underway. I see lots of children at the pow wows this year. Indian census numbers look to be increasing. A tatoo artist in the U.S. South tells me that a many of her blue collar white customers request tribal tatoos. Arizona just provided a common cause to local Indians and Indians from Mexico. Avatar strikes a chord in the collective tribal unconcious of the world and outsells all other movies of all time. Ulali's song "Mahk Ichi" is being sung by choirs in California and the Netherlands. It's on YouTube. Language programs are thriving all over Indian Country.
It's a good day to be Indigenous.
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I don't actually write much in this blog about the intellectuals who provide so much grist for my mill, so to speak. I have always been a reader, but I did not encounter Native writers until I found Vine Deloria's Custer Died for Your Sins in an army post library in 1989 or so. My mom tipped me off about Almanac of the Dead in 1993. Later I was introduced to the poetry and interviews of Joy Harjo.
Some family members, possibly perplexed by my interest in "Indians," think I like reading books about Indians. I tell them I read books by Indians.
Native writers are a big part of the fertilizer in the garden of my intellect, if you'll pardon the analogy. I am a gardener, so there is nothing negative intended. It's all good. There's retired professor Jack Forbes, the late Paula Gunn Allen, Marijo Moore, radio host Tiyokisin Ghosthorse and others who bring me new perspectives.
If you have visited my blog for any length of time since it went live in 2006, and if you appreciate the depth with which I handle subjects, then you might also enjoy being challenged by the same writers who continue to challenge me. Currently, Craig Womack, a professor at Emory University consistently writes most of what intrigues me. He writes beyond the provincial nature of too much writing (by writers of any background) today.
You can check him out on Youtube, giving speeches; you can hear his voice (in Mvskoke) in an animated online story about Creek Indian removal. If you live in Atlanta, you can take his classes at Emory. (I pity the Native students in Oklahoma who will no longer have the benefit of his presence, but I guess he had good reasons to move on.)
I'm still old-fashioned. The core of Womack's appeal to me will remain the written word. I love the immediacy of blogging, but it still doesn't compare to the quietness of books and essays. I still have friends with whom I communicate with handwritten letters!
I don't know where to begin on where Womack best challenges the status quo: his idea that Natives may have colonized English as much as the other way around; that the best way to re-incorporate the Freedmen is through the Creek practice of vnokeckv (love); that homophobia in the Native and non-Native worlds has obscured the importance of gay Cherokee playwright Lynn Riggs who gave us Oklahoma! ; that a public de-eroticization of Native people is a form of spiritual warfare; and so on.
Womack is unafraid to wade into the turbulent murky waters where swirls the currents of race and sex. He is also unafraid to tell you when he does not have all the answers, but he gives you courage to dive deeper.
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I was wrong. In large print I will say again, I was wrong about James Cameron's intentions about Avatar!
I have heard Mr. Cameron interviewed and he is more than good-intentioned about some serious indigenous issues. This month he was in Brazil protesting a hydroelectric project that will displace thousands of people. He said he deeply moved by how well indigenous people around the world are responding to Avatar.
So please discount the mostly crappy stuff I wrote on 3/13/10. James Cameron has no less than tapped into the collective indigenous unconcious, and I will give him nothing but RESPECT from now on.
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I just finished watching the fourth season of the HBO series Big Love, about a polygamous family in Utah. The fourth season was pretty good, and here are some thoughts:
First the Cons:
1. I grew to like the new opening title sequence. But the original title sequence established the order of the wives and also ended with a vision of the family's life in eternity, a central part of their identity. You can't separate them from their religion.
2. Season 3 corrected a big error from the first two seasons in that we often saw the adults with their large number of collective children. But in Season 4 that changed. In season 4 we hardly saw the four or five children under age seven, and the wives and Bill were always running here and there and it left me wondering, who's watching all those little kids? Even Nicky's teenage daughter attends high school, so without any domestic help, the wives' freewheeling lifestyle does not seem plausible.
3. Likewise, Bill did not seem to spend too much time at his two home-supply mega stores, he was so busy trying to run for office.
4. Juniper Creek is supposed to be a two-hour drive from Salt Lake City, but Bill and Nicky just drive there at the drop of a hat, and no one back home notices them missing for five hours in the middle of the week. (2 hours there, 2 hours back, and some time to do something at Juniper Creek).
5. The whole political campaign storyline was implausible. Bill is a prominient businessman and onetime mainstream Latter-Day Saint. The Mormons are pretty tight-knit, and when he, Barb and their three kids dropped out of their ward I don't believe the other Mormons just forgot about them. Salt Lake City is just not that big. Their kids were still in public school. Home Plus is a major local retailer. So how does he just start running for office and the LDS community forgets he is a polygamist? Most prominent Mormons have attended Brigham Young University, went on missions together, and keep in touch through business and politics. They usually have large families, and that means lots of cousins who also grow up together. ( I'm from a small town with a fair number of Mormons and there are only so many secrets you can keep. )
And Barb was "outed" as a polygamous the first season, and excommunicated in season 3, so how is their polygamous marriage a secret until after he wins the election?
The LDS are not too keen on polygamists. In reality, Bill's campaign would have been killed quietly behind closed doors. He wouldn't even be allowed to openly support another candidate, because of guilt by association.
Clearly someone from NY or LA wrote this season, without any knowledge of how small towns actually work. But then again, even in a big city like New York, there are social networks that would make it impossible to keep a secret.. There are millions of Catholics in New York, but if one priest converted to Islam, word would get around all the parishes pretty quickly. Even a big city contains smaller social networks as tight as any in a small town.
6. The Mexico storyline was pretty good--until the end. The Greens have been established in Mexico for decades, and have the respect of the local political officials. To survive in a world of private narco-militias the Greens must be packing themselves. So how can Lois Hendrickson slice the arm off their leader and live to tell about it?
The Pros--What I liked:
1. Big Love is one of the few TV shows to portray contemporary Native Americans. It was great to see Adam Beach onscreen. If you know anything about the Jack Abramoff lobbying scandal, you know a possible direction that Season 5 might go. I hope Season 5 goes deeper into the reality of Native Americans, who are a significant social reality in the western US in general and in the Mormon religion in particular.
2. The tragic love story between Albert "Alby" Grant and the trustee was really good. It actually made me like Alby for awhile, seeing his vulnerable side. And I felt sorry for his lover, struggling over his homosexuality. After the lover's suicide, now it seems Albie will go on to be a repressed homosexual and a dangerous sadistic homophobe. It happens that way sometimes.
3. I call it the "Racism Episode." There was that scene of the compound relatives watching a 1930s blackface movie scene. Nicky takes a handgun to Washington DC because its so "dangerous" (that is full of black people). Of course, Nicky turns out to be the most dangerous, carrying the gun into a government building and causing a scene. Nothing scarier than a scared white person with loaded firearm.
4. Great seeing Nicky cut off the braid and stepping into a new role, protecting her daughter and "standing by her man."
5. The scene where Bill tries to intimidate the Mexican police chief into helping him locate his son was great piece, especially if you understand Spanish, which I do. Synopsis: Bill is speaking English to an assistant of the police chief, and this subordinate interprets into Spanish for his boss. Bill does not get what he wants and says something negative about Mexico, etc. The chief, who has not spoken a word of English, does understand English, and says something in Spanish (that indicates his comprehension) to his assistant that ends the conversation. Bill never realizes that the chief understood every word he said in English, but the chief as a point of pride, was not going to make life easier for this demanding American. But you have to actually understand Spanish and English to really understand what happened.
6. Sara got married in Season 4 and has left town with her husband. The actress (Amanda Seyfried) has busy movie career, and her character can always come back. It's good for a family drama to let characters grow.
7. Marjean "extending" the family by marrying Bill's baby's mama's boyfriend to keep him in the country. A sexual threesome (or foursome, or fivesome) seems in the works. Perfectly sordid. I can't wait for Season 5.
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PBS is one of the few media outlets that even bothers to mention Native Americans, and again the only time this network disappoints me is when Henry Louis Gates gets in the game. Let me start by saying that I enjoy Dr. Gates' programs, his enthusiasm for his subject, and his willingness to take a fresh look at American life. And I was mostly pleased with his recent PBS production, Faces of America, which detailed the documented history of several diverse celebritiies, as he had done before with African American individuals (also mostly celebrities.) I like family stories, and I like the way he presented them. I like the background music and graphics.
Some highlights for me: Stephen Colbert (of the Colbert Report) learned that his great-something grandmother came from Ireland, landing in New York two days before the 1863 Draft and Race Riots in protest of the Civil War. Welcome to America! Colbert remarked, the first thing his ancestors learned was to not fight for the rights of black people. Great insight.
I was mostly happy until the end, when Dr. Gates presented his guests with racial admixture pie-graph charts of their DNA. Mexican-American actress Eva Longoria turned out to be 66% European (presumably Spanish), 31% Asian, and 3% African. Gates says on-camera that the "Asian" DNA includes Native American DNA. To her credit, Longoria herself knew about the African presence in Mexico, and she was not suprprised or bothered by the evidence in her own ancestry.(having a child with her Afro-German-French husband probably helped her to have some openess on the subject) She actually lamented having less indigenous Mexican ancestry than she had believed.
Why is the Native American DNA now being listed as "Asian DNA?" The Gates show lists European and Asian as separate DNA strains, and those two populations actually share the Eurasian landmass, so why is the DNA of the Americas, both North and South, reduced to a subset of the Asian? If Amerindians have been the most separate of continental populations, why is Amerindian DNA now being considered a subcategory of a population from which it has been supposedly separated for fifteen millenia?
Is this the same agenda that promoted the ice-age fossil Kennewick man as a Caucasian and of course the true "discoverer of America?"
I mean, seriously, Dr. Gates, when one travels north across the Sahara, there is no sharp break when the population changes from black African to Arab north African to Mediterranean white. And there is no sharp line between the so-called white races and Asian races when one travels east from Russia to Central Asia. These changes are gradual, but still science separates these DNA strains as separate "African," "European" and "Asian." But somehow the Ameriindian DNA must be subsumed under "Asian."
Is this a conspiracy to deprive the Amerindian of any standing whatsoever?
Which leads me to another celebrity profiled, author Louise Erdrich, who refused to have her DNA tested. Her father is German and she has even written books about it, but she was not subjecting her mother's Ojibway DNA to any TV show racial admixture test. An elder told her that her DNA was essentially private community property and it was not Erdrich's to give away. In one move she protected her privacy and her own people's Sovereignty over their identity. Kudos to her. She was Ojibway and that was that, and no genetic lab was going to get the chance to redefine her. Now that's Sovereignty.
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So much money used to pour into New York via Wall Street that a whole slew of problems could be drowned in dollars. No more. the lopsided economy of the Emprie State may tip over if changes don't come soon. Some in New York City say that NYC "subsidizes" the rest of the state (and by extension, the rest of the U.S.) because only the financial industry showed any growth in the past fifteen years. But that's looking at it backwards.
When I grew up in upstate NY, there were several thriving local economies based on manufacturing. Rochester had Kodak and Xerox, Binghamton had IBM, Schnectady had General Electric, Buffalo had auto and steel plants. Farming also thrived. Upstate New Yorkers, including my grandmother, parents, and myself, actually made things that could be sold. These places were not suburbs, but cities in their own right. They were too far from NYC for commuting, and that kept real estate prices affordable.
But things changed in the 1970s. The South offered low taxes and a warmer climate to lure business. IBM was the first high-tech firm to establish manufacturing computers in the Research Triangle Park of Raleigh-Durham, seeded by IBM staff from the Binghamton area.
Businesses continued to leave New York State, which refused to lower taxes. Even though the state's higher-tech industries survived the 1980s better than the rust-belt industries of Ohio and Illinois, they too fled south or succumbed to the changing economy.
But the tax structure of NY State continued on as if nothing had changed. So much money poured in from Wall Street that the state legislature and the governor could pretend the gravy train could last forever.
Who's to Blame:
Partly, its the culture of New York City, where people grow accostomed to high rents, high taxes and lots of regulations. NYC has all types of entitlements, like rent-controlled apartments and various kinds of welfare, to make life bearable. Upstate life required less welfare-type payments because an honest-day's work could still pay the rent. Until the factories left. The NYC mentality tackled the problem the way it was accostomed to handling it--providing more welfare, building more prisons to house prisoners (mostly from NYC), and shipping Section 8 (federal rent subsidies) tenants from NYC to the cheaper rents Upstate. So now arrogant NYC'ers blame Upstate for being a welfare case when it was NYC-style taxes that impoverished it in the first place.
I blame the "NYC mentality" because the bulk of the political power in the State comes from the City and the immediate suburbs. Both the Assembly and the State Senate are based on population, so the eight million City people and two or three million more in the immediate suburbs now dominate the remaining eight million in the rest of the state. All of New York's recent governors have been from the City or immediate downstate region. The City and downstaters, both Democrat and Republican, must share the blame because they have been in charge for the past thirty years.
Some Hopeful Signs:
When Senator Hillary Clinton left her seat to become Secretary or State in President Obama's administration, NY governor, David Paterson had to pick a replacement. He chose a female centrist upstate politician for the job and many downstate democrats were furious. How dare he pick this hick from upstate to "appease" the conservative white folks in the sticks! But this was a brilliant political move. The governor knew that several electoral districts of upstate had voted Democratic or Working Families Party in the 2004 election. He was right on the money when he sought to gain some political points with the vast uplands of the state.
About to Lose Again:
Gas drilling and possibly uranium mining is about to come to Upstate New York. Unlike many other states, New York does not even have a tax structure in place to take advantage of the gas profits that may be rolling in soon. It was beneath contempt of the downstate politicians to even consider it. Of course, cash-strapped upstate counties and landowners are working to lure gas drillers to their property. The Marcellus shale gas reserves are the biggest thing to hit the State since the industrial revolution.
And this time the Downstaters should really take notice because the drilling process risks polluting the water supply for the City, which depends on the mountain reservoirs to maintain itself.
You'd thing the governor and legislature in Albany, the alleged capital, would be working overtime to address the drilling issue, but no, they aren't accomplishing anything, as usual. There has not been a state budget passed on time in many years.
Solutions?
The downstate politicians have to wise up and realize they can't bankrupt the state with policies based only on Wall Street revenue. They have to encourage a future economy that is more balanced, with lots of manufacturing , the way it was forty years ago. Just being in New York City does not make you smart. Half of the City's high school students never graduate, and NYC is low on the list of college graduates as a proportion of its adult population. (Seattle and Raleigh, NC are #1 and #2 on that list).
A lot of work needs to be done both in Upstate and Downstate, and NYC has not sought to understand its own problems, and should stop blaming upstate for not understanding them.
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