Commentary Archives - Page 5 of 6

Why I’m Voting in Today’s Tiny Elections

November 8, 2011/0 Comments/in Commentary /by Katherine Cowley

I admit, the thing I’d like to do most today is stay at home and spend the day curled up with the new Brandon Sanderson book, Alloy of Law. In part it’s because I love the Mistborn series. In part it’s because I spent Sunday evening at the ER and am still on prescription medication. In part it’s because my husband is out of town, and what better way to fight against solitude than with a good book.

But no. That is not enough. I will pack up myself and my baby, bring my ID and my voting guide, and head over to Crescent Middle School to vote for Sandy City Council.

I was going to add the agonizing part about having to stand in line while your head is throbbing because it’s a common side effect of your medication, and on top of that having to entertain a baby who gets bored of staying still, but I realized that would be a lie. There will be no line, and I will be in and out of there in five minutes tops.

I’ve heard it estimated that only about 10% of registered Utah voters will come out to this year’s elections. (I’ll add the actual stat that turns out in a few days, once they’re published.)

Now that’s not 1 in 10 Utahns. That’s 1 in 10 registered voters. Thus, no line.

But even if there was a line, even if I had to wait an hour and a half (as I’ve had to do before, in 2008) I would be there, baby in tow, waiting to vote. Why the dedication?

Because local elections matter. Today I’m going to vote for two members of the Sandy City Council At-Large. The decisions made by the Sandy City council impact my life on a daily basis:

They make decisions regarding construction and development, and local zoning, for example the mega construction project going up across the street, and the types of parking lots we’re getting next to our new commuter train line.
They impact local taxes and local spending.
They make decisions about our schools, our local library, and policies for our police and fire departments.
Environment, immigration, and other big national issues have regular decisions made about them on a local scale.
They listen and talk to community members, and if I really care about an individual issue, I can truly make my voice heard.

In essence, the Sandy City Council impacts my daily quality of life. The roads all around me. The schools in my neighborhood. The policies that encourage and discourage local development and businesses. The libraries and parks I visit weekly. My taxes and other local policies.

The Sandy City Council has more impact on the day-to-day workings of my life than the President of the United States. What the President does may be more interesting or exciting or infuriating or whatever-you-feel, but what happens on a local level is what democracy is really about. It’s about communities saying, we share public interests. We can and should self-govern. We’re going to choose people we trust to work together with us to make important decisions, decisions that will change and shape our community and bring us into the future.

To me, freedom is only partly about freedom from restrictions. For example, I’m not restricted on my ability to bear arms. I could probably go out and buy a gun today–I’ve heard they carry them at Wal-Mart. However, I’m not going to. I don’t want a gun. I don’t know what I’d do with it. So I may literally have that freedom, but I don’t really, because I don’t have the knowledge or interest to use it.

More than freedom from restrictions, I love freedom to do things. Freedom to go to the church of my choice on the Sabbath and not be put in prison for it. Freedom to advocate for whatever belief I may have and not have tomatoes thrown at me (terrible practice, glad it’s been done away with). Freedom to write on a blog and give my (potentially incorrect) views to the world.

I love the freedom to be able to make a difference. Freedom to have a voice and use it. Freedom to act and make informed decisions. Freedom to say this is what the City Council should look like.

So today I’m going to vote for democracy. Will you?

Why I’m Still Going to Tell my Daughter That She’s Beautiful

June 30, 2011/3 Comments/in Commentary /by Katherine Cowley

Last week Lisa Bloom wrote an excellent article in the Huffington Post titled “How to Talk to Little Girls.” I agree that it’s sad that “twenty-five percent of American women would rather win America’s Next Top Model than the Nobel Peace Prize.” I agree that you should talk to little girls about their minds and “model for [them] what a thinking woman says and does.” I pretty much agreed with everything she wrote and how she wrote it. But a day later I found myself a little bothered by Lisa Bloom’s argument.

What Bloom proposes is that you should not talk to little girls about their looks, clothes, hair, etc., because “teaching girls that their appearance is the first thing you notice tells them that looks are more important than anything.”

Thus, when I tell my daughter that she is beautiful or when her grandma complements her on a cute outfit, we are ruining her.

I can’t bring myself to believe that this is true.

I agree with Bloom’s intent, and believe that our culture has major problems. I find myself regularly angered by the objectification and sex-tification of women, and increasingly so with the male-as-eye candy (“let’s objectify men because they objectified us first”). And I believe that a focus on appearance can feed into these things, as well as a list of other problems.

However, I feel much more comfortable with a modified version of Bloom’s argument: “Only focusing on physical appearance will cause long term damage on the well-being of little girls.” I think the word only is the key.

Let’s imagine the reverse. A little girl that grows up, never once having anyone complement her physical appearance. To me, this could be just as damaging, even if all little girls were treated that way. The problem is that it devalues the body, says that the body is not important, an annoyance even. Something that should be, at best, ignored.

But the body is important. Our minds are made up of physical matter. Our eyes experience wonder at the world. Our ears hear sounds, and with our mouths, make communication possible. The way we take care of our bodies through food and exercise makes it possible for us to run, breath, live, move, experience. Our fingers can type and turn the pages of a book.

Taken to an extreme, taking care of our bodies becomes destroying our bodies, and our society is filled with this extreme, so I appreciate Bloom’s argument even if I don’t agree with it completely.

I admit, part of my perspective on this subject comes from my membership in the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. Our theology teaches that our bodies are as essential as our spirits. For us, original sin was more of a transgression than a sin, the forbidden fruit necessary so we could have a full range of experiences with our bodies and spirits. Recently, one of our church leaders, David Bednar, gave a discourse entitled “Things as they Really are.” As Bednar points out, one of the challenges and risks of cyberspace is that online interaction can devalue the body, causing us to “miss the richness of person-to-person communication”; “many forms of computer-mediated interaction…can displace the full range of physical capacity and experience.”

The physical body is essential and good. Ignoring the physical body as we speak to little girls will hurt them just as we can hurt them by focusing only on physical appearance. I agree with Lisa Bloom–I want my daughter to be smart and to value her mind. I do not want her to not kill her body by dieting or change her body with plastic surgery or succumb to the propaganda that a particular physical form equates to happiness and success. And so I read my daughter books on trucks and animals, sing her songs and rhymes about both pirates and princesses, and try teaching her ridiculously big words for a child under the age of one (I couldn’t help it–incandescent is such a good word). I also help her exercise her muscles, teaching her to crawl and stand, to grab and to reach. And on some days, I dress her in an absurdly cute, frilly yellow dress covered with flowers and tell her that she’s beautiful. I hope she feels good in the same way I feel good when my husband tells me “You’re beautiful” before he asks me about what I’ve been reading, thinking, and doing.

(my daughter enjoys her physical body)

In fact, every single day I tell my daughter that she is beautiful. And every day, I teach her what it means to be a beautiful woman. A beautiful woman is appealing both inside and out. A beautiful woman is smart, and maybe some day will be like her mom and grandma and go to graduate school. A beautiful woman is spiritual and sensitive to the needs of those around her. A beautiful woman is healthy and strong, and while she takes care of her appearance, she feels confidence in her body as it is. Dearest daughter, you are beautiful.

Forgetting (or never knowing) Real Kangaroos

May 4, 2011/1 Comment/in Commentary /by Katherine Cowley

Today I learned what a kangaroo looks like.

Not that I didn’t know what a kangaroo is. A marsupial that can carry its young, it has ears, can hop, and lives in Australia.

The problem being that this is the only image of a kangaroo that I could bring up in my mind:

Yes, these are the kangaroos from Winnie the Pooh. (Kanga and little Roo.)

This is disturbing to me on multiple levels.

Mostly, I’m disturbed because of this painting by Rene Magritte:

The piece is called “The Treachery of Images.” The description reads, “This is not a pipe.”

To me, the point is, we’re so attached to images that we intentionally mistake them for reality. Someone holds up a picture of a pipe and asks, “What is this?” and we respond “It’s a pipe.” When really, it’s a representation of a pipe. It certainly can’t be smoked.

This brings me to Saussure. A linguistic theorist. Basically, he says that we have signs, that we use to communicate and interpret the word. A sign might be the word “kangaroo”; I’d go so far to say that a picture of a kangaroo could also be a sign. A sign is made up of two things–the signifier (the form of the sign, whether it’s the letters that make up the word “kangaroo” or the cartoon outline) and the signified (the concept that is represented by the sign–a real-life kangaroo hopping along in Australia).

So what happens when the first and only thing that I can bring to mind with the word kangaroo is a picture from Winnie the Pooh? The word no longer means a real-life marsupial, but a cartoon image to me. And if I look at a picture of Kanga and little Roo, (and get songs about Christopher Robin stuck in my head), and I can’t remember what this image of a kangaroo is actual supposed to represent, then the sign, the image, is not pointing to anything after all. It’s an end unto itself. And the kangaroo has officially become extinct–at least to me.

My husband helped me rectify this situation. We spent half an hour on youtube tonight watching kangaroos jump, drink water, box, and have baby kangaroos (called joeys–who knew?!?) climb in and out of their pouches. For good measure, we watched videos of other marsupials, like koalas and tasmanian devils.

I feel much better about life now. My representation (the word kangaroo, and the cartoon picture) is once again a representation, and not an end unto itself.

(Note: I have put no pictures of real kangaroos in this post. If you don’t remember what a kangaroo looks like, you should google it. Also, I didn’t want to think about the implications of a video of a kangaroo still being a representation, and no the actual thing….)

My Internet Alphabet Book: The Web Page I Visit Most for Each Letter of the Alphabet

January 31, 2011/5 Comments/in Commentary /by Katherine Cowley

Alphabet books never get old. So I’ve put together one based off of the web pages I visit most frequently for every letter of the alphabet.

This project was made possible in part by Google Chrome’s lovely autocomplete function, which bases its suggestions off of the websites where I most frequently visit. It was also made possible by my high school art teacher, though I can guarantee the drawing skills I demonstrate below would get me a C out of her class.

My Internet Alphabet Book

A is for Amazon, a company I willingly give money, primarily because I love my Kindle.

B is for Blackboard, the classroom management system I used for teaching last semester, despite the fact that I despise its closed system, constant problems and shutdowns, and large, take-over-the-universe feel.

C is for CNN, and for “C-N” (seein’) only US news, without an international perspective. Yet obviously I turn here for news.

D is for Days of Film, the daily video blog I am writing (filming) this year.

E is for ESPN, because we all know I’m a sports buff. (Now I know what my husband does when he borrows my computer.)

F is for Facebook, my social media site of choice.

G is for Gmail, which I have been lucky enough to be using since September 2004, when invitations were still hard to come by. (Being an early Gmail user may be my only technological claim to fame, so I might as well milk it.)

H is for Hotmail, my high school email account that I now spam anytime I need to give a website/organization an email address that I know they will use to send me things I don’t want.

I is for IMDB, the Internet Movie Database. What can I say? I love movies.

J is for JoAnn’s, one of my local craft store sources for yarn, fabric, and hours of DIY fun and self-fulfillment.

K is for KSL, a good source for local news and weather. (Apparently it snowed last night! Perhaps I could have opened the curtains.)

L is for Library, a never-ending source of entertainment, insight, research, and perspective.

M is for my husband’s email (and for conclusive proof that he borrows my computer).

N is for NaNoWriMo, and my successful completion of a 50,000 word novel draft during the 30 day month of November 2010.

O is for Open Source Sonnets, a website that features newly written sonnets by Gideon Burton. These sonnets are “open source” because you are free to remix and repost as you might like–something I did in a sonnet titled “My Grandmother’s Crossing.” Interesting side note: this is one of the only “small,” non-corporate websites in my alphabet book. (This is in-line with recent research, for example, Matthew Hindman’s book The Myth of Digital Democracy, which demonstrates that most web users visit primarily popular, corporate-sponsored websites–the main influencers of politics and culture online.)

P is for Pandora, my primary source of Internet radio.

Q is for Questar Gas and a bill that I pay every month.

R is for Ride UTA, the local public transit website.

S is for Sporcle, an ever-replenishing site filled with addictive trivia quizzes that both me and my husband enjoy.

T is for Twitter, a social media site where everything is short and sweet, including the limited amounts of time I spend here. (My husband owns a Twitter bird stuffed animal. It’s blue and fuzzy. Yes, now you’re jealous.)

U is for Upload.youtube.com. I am not just a consumer of media. Like you, I am an empowered creator.

V is for Vote.utah.gov. I am a firm believer that local politics deserve our attention and participation, and that if we enjoy living in a democracy, we have the responsibility to actively engage in neighborhood and community democratic processes. (And now I will step off my soapbox–after all, it’s someone else’s turn.)

W is for Wikipedia. I love the quote by founder Jimmy Wales: “Imagine a world in which every single person on the planet is given free access to the sum of all human knowledge.”

X is for X96. Apparently it’s a local radio station, but I’ve never listened to it. And apparently Google Chrome comes up with its own ideas if you don’t have sites you’ve visited for certain letters of the alphabet.

Y is for YouTube. Visual typography of terrible user-generated reviews? Clips of old films? Educational movies? Music videos? Scary remixes of Mary Poppins? You want it, you can find it.

Z is for Zion’s Bank. I do visit my credit union”s website frequently, but I admit that I have never kept my money at Zion’s Bank.

And so that’s my Internet Alphabet book. If you use Chrome, do any of the autocomplete websites that come up when you type in a letter surprise you?

(Note: this alphabet book is current as of January 2011… but the websites I visit do change over time. A few of my most visited sites changed in the month it took me to draw pictures for this post.)

The Steady Spread of the Deadly Atom: JFK’s Inaugural Address in the context of the Cold War

January 20, 2011/0 Comments/in Commentary /by Katherine Cowley

“The steady spread of the deadly atom” was a term coined by John F. Kennedy in his inaugural address. It evokes the fear of the Cold War, and the uncontrollable elements of the atomic weapons that we (and our Soviet neighbors) theoretically controlled.

Unluckily, “the steady spread of the deadly atom” was not a phrase I had ever heard before today. Because I admit, prior to seeing today’s Google’s Event Logo, I had never read or viewed JFK’s inaugural address, delivered 50 years ago, on January 20, 1961.

Like most Americans, my education about his address consisted of 3 or 4 quotable lines, most notably, “Ask not what your country can do for you; ask what you can do for your country.” Memorable? Yes. Timeless? Yes. Overused? Most certainly.

Contrast that phrase, which somehow manages to simultaneously be both trite and inspiring, with the following sentence from the speech, which reveals a rational voice piercing through the terror of the times:

But neither can two great and powerful groups of nations take comfort from our present course — both sides overburdened by the cost of modern weapons, both rightly alarmed by the steady spread of the deadly atom, yet both racing to alter that uncertain balance of terror that stays the hand of mankind’s final war.

No longer is it simply atomic weapons that frighten us. The apocalyptic imagery of “mankind’s final war” is brought about by “the deadly atom,” a presumably small force that somehow wields parasitic, deathly power. An ordinary atom–like the atoms in you and me, in our schools and in our homes–is elevated to being deadly, to being a nuclear force. This language implies that the threat is among us. It is everywhere. And it may just very well destroy us.

This parasitic, destructive imagery is reminiscent of the pop culture of the 1950s. Take the 1958 genre film The Blob as an example. Some sort of tiny red thing (or, for lack of a better word, blob) lands in a small town in a missile-like container. Are aliens responsible? Or the Soviets? We never find out. This blob slowly starts taking over the town, eating pets and then people, growing at an unstoppable rate.

Yet while The Blob can be rather laughable (though it’s well worth watching), the deadly atom of JFK’s speech is anything but funny. It weightiness is more along the lines of the inevitably dark 1955 film noir Kiss Me Deadly, in which a mysterious Pandora’s box (that inevitably must be opened) contains a deadly atomic force strong enough to destroy the world.

Today the phrase “the deadly atom” does not seem to have the same weight. After all, we do not live in the shadow of a Cold War. Yet the risk of our weapons, the power of our everyday tools to destroy, is much the same today as it was in 1961. So perhaps we should follow the invitation John F. Kennedy gave directly following his description of atomic fears:

So let us begin anew — remembering on both sides that civility is not a sign of weakness, and sincerity is always subject to proof. Let us never negotiate out of fear, but let us never fear to negotiate.

Let both sides explore what problems unite us instead of belaboring those problems which divide us.

Let both sides explore what problems unite us instead of belaboring those problems which divide us.

In the face of deathly physical force, language may be the only solution.

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