How to Lose Students and Alienate Community

In the Albuquerque Journal this morning, there was an article discussing the new smoking bans on the university of New Mexico campus. Here's a map of the designated smoking areas with perhaps the best one-sentence summary of the issue. Initially, it is easy to sympathize with the college - in an ideal world, no one ever dies of lung cancer from second hand smoke, and that's a noble aim. But noble aims go pear shaped all the time.

When I was a high schooler, I helped engineer and pass a ban on smoking at UU youth conferences in my district. I'd lost a grandparent to lung cancer not long before. I was no fan of smoking, and high school conferences had previously had a problem of an exclusive community of smokers existing. That in turn led to people who wanted to spend time with their friends either breathing a lot of second hand smoke or starting smoking themselves, both of which are far from ideal for a religious youth conference. On top of it all, UUs tend to have a high ratio of asthmatics/those with breathing problems, and smoke itself was a hazard for them. So many of us moved to pass a ban by majority vote. We succeeded.

What happened, then, was a lot of destruction. Con-goers who smoked would come with their addiction, but being high schoolers, without the income to have nicotine gum or patches instead of cigarettes. Or they would sneak off to try and calm their addiction so they could be present for community, and we'd ban them from coming back. A few youth, in the middle of high school, just stopped coming to cons outright, feeling unwelcome and hated by their peers. It was against the spirit of the community, and the values of the religion, and the ban remains to this day. It is by far the most lasting decision I had made as part of that community, and it causes harm. What it doesn't do is get people to stop smoking. Our noble aim failed utterly.

The ban didn't actually address any real problems. It was a prohibition, and it attempted to excise a behavior. Had we been concerned about the health of the asthmatics, we would have kept smoking outside and away from entryways. Had we been concerned about the health of smokers, we could have provided nicotine patches for them, and let them still be part of our community. And had we cared for the whole of the community, we would have enacted a policy by a system of consensus, not a majority vote, and certainly not by a handed-down ruling. We did none of this, and instead shifted problems around. We lost people, we made others feel uncomfortable, and we violated our own principles.

The UNM smoking ban is well-intentioned. But it is a frustrating prohibition forced upon legal adults, and it goes beyond necessary restriction (like 30 feet from entryways) to become an obsessive nanny state policy. And it might ultimately have the desired effect, but I still feel that it shows a disregard for the capacity of adults to make personally responsible choices. Part of giving people freedom, and giving people responsibility, is giving room for mistakes. Here, I think, it'd do well to quote Lux Alptraum:

And this is, perhaps, the crux of a progressive discourse: to be able to recognize the reality and rationale of bad decisions, while still pushing forward with an idea of what we all should be doing, of what our best decisions look like. Because it’s only with the knowledge of what we should be doing, and why, that we have the ability to stray safely — to make those mistakes and live to regret them (or not regret them, as the case may be).

In order to be rational people, we have to have that range of decision making. Forcing people's decisions simply doesn't work.

Violence is Silence

“From my own experience visiting the troops in the Middle East, I can tell you this though, despite how the conflict has been portrayed by our glorious media, if you gave any US soldier a gun with two bullets in it, and he found himself in an elevator with Nancy Pelosi, Harry Reid, and Osama bin Laden, there’s a good chance that Nancy Pelosi would get shot twice." -- David Faherty

There are few things to me more disturbing then that above sentence. It's a sentiment wholly alien to my being. I like social order. Alienated though my views can be from the general electorate, I think that social order is at least a worthy aim, an understood and accepting thing. For all the fears people built around "Change", change is an incredibly modest, statist word. It isn't arguing for an overthrow. It isn't calling for a sweeping realignment of social organs. It isn't challenging the very notions of statehood. It is, really, a slight adjusting of the rudder. It's not transforming the boat into a helicopter. "Change" likes the general contours f the system, and just hates a lot of the specifics. It's really surprising that people could must up such fervor for as modest a concept, and perhaps the fervor is what was reacted to. And hopefully, once the presidency is well under way, we'll see people calm down and accept it as the modest, statist thing it is.

And hopefully comments like this will stop happening. I mean, fine, private conversation, or choir-preachy websites. Free speech is well and good; I'm not opposed to that, and don't seek to stop it.

But what I would like to see wane, if not disappear, is this notion that the response to something moderately disagreeable is implied murder, or justified violent agrny outbursts. As harmless as that may be intended, it's terrifying. The implication - that members of the US armed forces are universally assumed to prefer the death of a domestic politician they dislike than the death of a man responsible for killing 3,000+ innocents boggles.

And I get that this is an attention-grabbing statement. And that, by acknowledging it, I'm only feeding the problem, giving the guy a larger audience for his soapbox. And this post is probably unnecessary - there will be better and more numerous deconstructions online, and in most media outlets. The statement deserves to be deconstructed, if there is any real sentiment behind it. Because that sentiment is profoundly opposed to social order, and seeks a world of platonic absolutes instead of this messy land of disagreement and compromise. It's the same motivation that fuels international jihadist violence - if the center is undesireable, the center is untenable. And if the center (broadly speaking, functioning democracy) is untenable (say, Pelosi dead), then extremists (the hypothetical US soldier, or bin Laden) get to just go at it, in a violent world of conflicting absolutes. And to get to that point you have to stifle dissent, alienate all those on your side who disagree. You have to not only call for the death of elected leaders, who are inherently moderate beings, having accepted the social order and the system in which they exist, but you have to make it impossible for such moderate leaders to speak against the excessed of their friends and allies. Once that happens, civilization becomes an angry little suicide pact.

The statement itself is only half the reason I'm upset. What bothers me more is that a friend of mine from college, a moderate Republican from Colorado, who was the most diehard supporter of McCain I've ever met, loves this quote. He gives reasons - the detachment of Pelosi's ideals from that of the rest of the US, say, but reasons don't matter. We can't, as a nation, have our ongoing experiment (one of a democracy that doesn't kill itself) if we think calling for the death of elected leaders we disagree with is acceptable. It just doesn't work that way.

There are few things, ever, that chip away at my faith in humanity. My friend's endorsement of this statement was one.

A rare personal post

So, yeah. Not great, but at least we're bucking the trend.

Petty Water Frustrations

Tap-water is a pretty remarkable thing. We think about it an awful lot in the southwest, or at least we're starting to. I remember water conservation edutainment plays from elementary school, and at summer camp in New Jersey I had a culture shock when the guys in my dorm left the faucet running while brushing their teeth. Scary, I know, but it struck me as something akin to blasphemy

So I'm a big fan of using little water, of using the cheapest water, and of being grateful for that water. If they existed, I'd probably be in favor of a still-suit dress code. Okay, that's a tad extreme, but it's my opposition to dress codes and not conservation that rules it out.

But this whole bottled water thing is frustrating, and I cannot fathom my numerous peers who have crates and crates of bottled water shipped to their dorm rooms, or my peers who will only drink water that has been purchased in gallon jugs from Whole Foods. I will carry my water in jugs when civilization has collapsed, but until then I am perfectly content with tap water, and cannot fathom the need for water that "tastes better".

This all would be an empty rant were it not for the high social costs of bottled water, and the very easy social gains of tap water. Bottled water is an entirely unnecessary product, and tap water is a vital social good. I'm behind the times, but today I found out about pre-paid cards for tap water. Brilliant invention of capitalism, but a terrifying loss of the common good. And, at the same time water is privatized (in such a way that facilitates the spread of water-borne diseases), New York City has had to launch a campaign to say "this tap water you guys have had for a surprisingly long time, you can drink it. It's cool, no really."

Bah. It's unfortunate that it takes the scarcity of the desert to produce some common sense.