Some articles
Sep. 22nd, 2007 10:17 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
conuly
Calls for a Breakup Grow Ever Louder in Belgium
Calls for a Breakup Grow Ever Louder in Belgium
By ELAINE SCIOLINO
BRUSSELS, Sept. 16 — Belgium has given the world Audrey Hepburn, René Magritte, the saxophone and deep-fried potato slices that somehow are called French.
But the back story of this flat, Maryland-size country of 10.4 million is of a bad marriage writ large — two nationalities living together that cannot stand each other. Now, more than three months after a general election, Belgium has failed to create a government, producing a crisis so profound that it has led to a flood of warnings, predictions, even promises that the country is about to disappear.
“We are two different nations, an artificial state created as a buffer between big powers, and we have nothing in common except a king, chocolate and beer,” said Filip Dewinter, the leader of Vlaams Belang, or Flemish Bloc, the extreme-right, xenophobic Flemish party, in an interview. “It’s ‘bye-bye, Belgium’ time.”
Radical Flemish separatists like Mr. Dewinter want to slice the country horizontally along ethnic and economic lines: to the north, their beloved Flanders — where Dutch (known locally as Flemish) is spoken and money is increasingly made — and to the south, French-speaking Wallonia, where a kind of provincial snobbery was once polished to a fine sheen and where today old factories dominate the gray landscape.
“There are two extremes, some screaming that Belgium will last forever and others saying that we are standing at the edge of a ravine,” said Caroline Sägesser, a Belgian political analyst at Crisp, a socio-political research organization in Brussels. “I don’t believe Belgium is about to split up right now. But in my lifetime? I’d be surprised if I were to die in Belgium.”
With the headquarters of both NATO and the European Union in Brussels, the crisis is not limited to this country because it could embolden other European separatist movements, among them the Basques, the Lombards and the Catalans.
Since the kingdom of Belgium was created as an obstacle to French expansionism in 1830, it has struggled for cohesion. Anyone who has spoken French in a Flemish city quickly gets a sense of the mutual hostility that is a part of daily life here. The current crisis dates from June 10, when the Flemish Christian Democrats, who demand greater autonomy for Flanders, came in first with one-fifth of the seats in Parliament.
Yves Leterme, the party leader, would have become prime minister if he had been able to put together a coalition government.
But he was rejected by French speakers because of his contempt for them — an oddity since his own father is a French speaker. He further alienated them, and even some moderate Flemish leaders, on Belgium’s national holiday, July 21, when he appeared unable — or unwilling — to sing Belgium’s national anthem.
Belgium’s mild-mannered, 73-year-old king, Albert II, has struggled to mediate, even though under the Constitution he has no power other than to appoint ministers and rubber-stamp laws passed by Parliament. He has welcomed a parade of politicians and elder statesmen to the Belvedere palace in Brussels, successively appointing four political leaders to resolve the crisis. All have failed.
On one level, there is normalcy and calm here. The country is governed largely by a patchwork of regional bureaucracies, so trains run on time, mail is delivered, garbage is collected, the police keep order.
Officials from the former government — including former Prime Minister Guy Verhhofstadt, who is ethnically Flemish — report for work every day and continue to collect salaries. The former government is allowed to pay bills, carry out previously decided policies and make urgent decisions on peace and security.
Earlier this month, for example, the governing Council of Ministers approved the deployment of 80 to 100 peacekeeping troops to Chad and a six-month extension for 400 Belgian peacekeepers stationed in Lebanon under United Nations mandates.
But a new government will be needed to approve a budget for next year.
Certainly, there are reasons Belgium is likely to stay together, at least in the short term.
Brussels, the country’s overwhelmingly French-speaking capital, is in Flanders and historically was a Flemish-speaking city. There would be overwhelming local and international resistance to turning Brussels into the capital of a country called Flanders.
The economies of the two regions are inextricably intertwined, and separation would be a fiscal nightmare.
Then there is the issue of the national debt (90 percent of Belgium’s gross domestic product) and how to divide it equitably.
But there is also deep resentment in Flanders that its much healthier economy must subsidize the French-speaking south, where unemployment is double that of the north.
[A poll by the private Field Research Institute released on Tuesday indicated that 66 percent of the inhabitants of Flanders believe that the country will split up “sooner or later,” and 46 percent favor such a division. The poll, which was conducted by telephone, interviewed 1,000 people.]
French speakers, meanwhile, favor the status quo. “Ladies and gentlemen, everything’s fine!” exclaimed Mayor Jacques Étienne of Namur, the Walloon capital, at the annual Walloon festival last Saturday.
Acknowledging that talk of a “divorce” had returned, he reminded the audience that this was a day to celebrate, saying, “We have to, if possible, forget about our personal worries and the anxieties of our time.”
Belgium has suffered through previous political crises and threats of partition. But a number of political analysts believe this one is different.
The turning point is widely believed to have been last December when RTBF, a French-language public television channel, broadcast a hoax on the breakup of Belgium.
The two-hour live television report showed images of cheering, flag-waving Flemish nationalists and crowds of French-speaking Walloons preparing to leave, while also reporting that the king had fled the country.
Panicked viewers called the station, and the prime minister’s office condemned the program as irresponsible and tasteless. But for the first time, in the public imagination, the possibility of a breakup seemed real.
Contributing to the difficulty in forming a new government now is the fact that all 11 parties in the national Parliament are local, not national, parties. The country has eight regional or language-based parliaments.
Oddly, there is no panic just now, just exasperation and a hint of embarrassment. “We must not worry too much,” said Baudouin Bruggeman, a 55-year-old schoolteacher, as he sipped Champagne at the festival in Namur. “Belgium has survived on compromise since 1830. Everyone puffs himself up in this banana republic. You have to remember that this is Magritte country, the country of surrealism. Anything can happen.”
An article on TV for tots
Should tots watch TV?
Most kids under 2 are parked in front of the electronic babysitter every day. Author Lisa Guernsey explains how the tube impacts the smallest couch potatoes.
By Katharine Mieszkowski
Sep. 14, 2007 | Journalist Lisa Guernsey's first child was just 5 weeks old and colicky when a sympathetic friend introduced the harried new mom to "baby crack," better known as Baby Mozart. The baby-crack-pusher promised that this video for infants and toddlers could buy Guernsey and her daughter some temporary relief. So, Guernsey popped that sucker in the VCR, and along with her 5-week-old, went down the rabbit hole into the strange, fun-house world of children's media, where you're never too young to be plugged in.
As a reporter for the New York Times, Guernsey had covered personal technology, digital media and electronic toys. For her new book, "Into the Minds of Babes: How Screen Time Affects Children From Birth to Age Five," she scrutinized the most recent research on kids' videos, TV, interactive games and Web sites to try to suss out what infants and toddlers actually comprehend when they look at the screen, and how it impacts them, for good or ill. The book draws on interviews with child psychologists and parents, as well as her own experiences raising two daughters, now ages 3 and 5.
Guernsey comes off as neither an opponent of kids under 5 watching videos -- her own did, and still do -- nor as an apologist for the much-hyped educational claims of many baby videos and interactive games. Notably, she finds as much for parents to be concerned about in background television (when a TV is just left turned on for hours on end even if no one is watching it) as anything that's explicitly made for young kids.
Salon reached Guernsey by phone at her home office in Alexandria, Va., where she argued that letting your child watch the tube won't warp her developing brain, yet it's unlikely to give her a leg up on language development either.
The American Academy of Pediatrics recommends that children under age 2 watch no TV and spend no time in front of the computer. Yet, 60 percent of parents allow their kids under 2 to watch some TV or video every day. What do you make of this discrepancy?
I found that it's pretty unrealistic for most families to keep TV away from their youngest kids, even in well-meaning ways. Many households use the television for information and entertainment, and to find out what the weather is going to be like.
Is there any evidence that young kids today actually spend more time in front of the TV screen than kids the same age did 30 years ago?
I really tried to figure that out. I kept thinking: "Is it just that we have nostalgia for some bygone day when children were forever playing with pots and pans on the floor? Or, are we forgetting that even in the '60s and '70s, there was television on when toddlers were around?"
I never came up with a satisfactory answer. But what I did find is that even some studies looking at time spent in front of the TV back in the '90s showed more television use among young kids, before the days of Baby Einstein, than today.
Do you see videos for very young children as a convenience for the parents rather than as a benefit for the child?
Parents, myself included, have used video to take a breath, to make a bunch of phone calls that they need to make, to unload the dishwasher. I think that video, certainly with these younger ages, is being used as a way to buy some time.
There was a recent study from the University of Washington, which found that Baby Einstein may actually hinder children's language development, leading bloggers to cackle "Baby Einstein makes baby stupid!" Did you find any evidence that Baby Einstein is beneficial in anyway?
I did not. What I did find is that videos like Baby Einstein that may purport to stimulate cognitive development or language learning may not be designed using the principles that developmental psychologists know apply to these very young children.
An example is the way that children learn language. The more a caregiver points to and labels what they're talking about -- "Here's an apple. Do you want an apple for your lunch? It's a red apple" -- and the more the child is able to see that apple at the exact same time those words are being said, the more children will learn. They'll get the word "apple." They'll start to understand the color red. But a lot of these videos are not designed with those principles in mind.
You debunk a lot of the popular beliefs about the bad things TV does to kids, for instance, the idea that when kids watch TV they turn into zoned-out "zombies," or catch attention deficit hyperactivity disorder [ADHD]. What's the evidence that's not true?
Those were two things that I worried about a lot as a mom. There are no studies that show television causing attention problems. All we have is a link, an association. The more that I talked to experts on ADHD, I found a lot of reason to think that children who have attention problems are either more attracted to television, or their parents use the television more in their households.
Because the parents need a break from the ADHD kids?
It may be hard to focus those kids' attention on a book, it's hard to get them to stay in one place in the room. Perhaps the parents of children like that are finding: "OK, at least I can get 30 minutes or an hour of peace if we turn on the TV."
The other piece is the fact that ADHD has a genetic component. Many researchers see that people with ADHD use the television more, they have it on in their houses more often. So, you have the ADHD parent, who then has the TV on more often in their house, and they're caring for a young child. But to say that looking at a screen for 30 minutes a day is going to cause attention problems, there's just no evidence of that at all.
What about the zombie theory?
The zombie effect is the idea that children mentally clock out when they're watching TV, that they're intellectually vacant.
In fact, what I found is more and more research that shows how mentally engaged children are, particularly after age 2 and a half to 3. They're really trying to figure out what they're seeing on the screen. There are studies done on "Sesame Street" that showed that children could clearly detect a difference at very young ages between a scrambled version of "Sesame Street" and the real one. The fact that they can make that distinction is proof that when they're watching, they're engaged.
At 30 months, that's when a lot of children start to understand that this happened, and then this happened, then that happened. Dan Anderson at the University of Massachusetts, a researcher who has done just decades of work in this area, has found that at about 30 months, when children start wanting to actually sit through a whole book, that's often when they start to be more and more attracted to TV.
They'll want to see how a show ends, and they'll become very upset if you try to turn off "Dora the Explorer" in the middle of the show. They can get that Dora is on a journey to a place, or she's trying to solve a puzzle, and they need to see what happens next.
The flip side, though, is that kids younger that that can't tell the difference when researchers rearrange the sequence of a show, right?
Particularly the youngest ones. In a study done by Dan Anderson, he took "Teletubbies," and he cut it up. He made the sequence not make any sense. What he found was that at 12 months, the children who were watching the scrambled versions showed no signs of seeing that it was any different than the regular.
That doesn't mean that if they see a blue ball, they're not processing maybe color or shape. We don't know exactly what they're getting. But we do know that they're not understanding that the stories being told on video mean something.
In "Everything Bad Is Good For You: How Today's Popular Culture Is Actually Making Us Smarter," writer Steven Johnson argues that the complexity of contemporary TV shows, like "The Sopranos" or "The West Wing," makes viewers smarter. Yet, you found that when it comes to very young kids, children only benefit from the simplest narratives, without a lot of jump cuts.
Children at these young ages need to see things at the pace of normal life, and see that they're going from point A to point B. For young kids, particularly under the age of 4, they're not getting some of the more abstract notions that adults take away from TV -- a character's motivation, for instance. They're not seeing that this character may look kind of evil, but in fact he's trying to help the victim. All they're seeing is long teeth on a dog, or a scary-looking house. Everything is so literal to them.
Anything that is abstract, or anything that is being talked about but not present on the screen, is very likely going over their heads. I've seen this even in shows that are designed for preschoolers, like "Bob the Builder."
You report that in 39 percent of households with kids under age 4 the TV is on most or all of the time. What are the impacts of so-called background TV on young kids?
I think that we're spending too much time talking about baby videos, and not enough talking about background television. There are three places in which we already have evidence of a negative impact.
The first is on the way a child plays, and the amount of time that a young child, a toddler even, spends with a toy. When there is, say, "Jeopardy" going on in the background, the kids go from one toy to another toy to another. And they're not taking as much time with the toy to explore it, or play with it as they would be if the TV was off.
Secondly, parents interact less with their children when the TV is on in the background. And to me that was a no-brainer, because I'm just as susceptible to being distracted by the television as my kids are. But I would have days where I had the TV on and my 18-month-old would be kind of just pushing a toy around the room. And I'd say: "She's fine. She's not even interested in this program." But what I didn't realize, then, is: How is it changing the way that I interact with her? Is it changing the length of time that I might talk to her about something she sees?
Then, the third piece is on language development. Studies on background noise have shown that infants and toddlers have a very hard time hearing the words in speech when they have noise to compete with, when there is background noise. One study from the University of Maryland showed that 7-and-a half-month-old infants could not segment speech very well when there was background chatter. That means that they couldn't catch a word in a sentence. It was just kind of all running together for them.
So, even when your child isn't paying attention to the TV, the sound of it may be having an impact?
I changed my habits at home, after I discovered some of this research. I started becoming much more thoughtful about when I was really listening to the radio, and turning it off when I really wasn't listening. I wanted my children to hear my voice, and only my voice sometimes. I wanted some quiet in the house.
Do you think that kids who are older than age 2 who aren't exposed to any educational TV are missing out? Or, does that all depend on what they're doing instead?
I certainly don't want to judge anybody's family, and how they decide to use TV, but I do now have much more appreciation for well-made shows.
I know that "Blue's Clues" is really well made. I know that there is solid research that shows that it helps children have more flexible thinking. So, I think that maybe 30 minutes of "Blue's Clues" at this moment may be better than them dealing with me being stressed out, and trying to call my health insurance company at the same time that I'm supposed to be interacting with them. When I have those kind of trade-offs to make, when there's a well-made show that I can pop in, I'm going to go for that video.
I look for signs that the show is designed to elicit participation from my daughters. Sometimes that means a character facing the screen, talking out to the audience, and asking a question. Sometimes it's even cartoon characters that do that, like Dora the Explorer. Twenty-four-month-olds really are able to transfer knowledge from the screen to their world, if they are participating and engaged in a conversation with the person on the screen. Just the simple act of talking back to the screen, like shouting out an answer, shows that they're mentally engaged.
What are some signs that a video might be over the head of a young child?
Media that's a little bit frightening, parents watch and say: "Oh, but everyone is OK in the end, and look, he was just pretending." However, children at these young ages often don't remember anything about the resolution, or the motivation, or the plot.
Parents who say, "It's not real. It's not real. Don't worry, it's not real," to really young kids, that kind of information just doesn't help them. They don't know what is real, and what isn't real. There is some research out there that shows it's not until kindergarten or elementary school that children really start to understand the difference between things that are real and things that are fantasy.
So, I think that a sign of a program that is not really designed well for kids is one that unnecessarily scares them; even though it may all look good in the end, all it's done is given them a scary image, and that's probably all they're going to remember.
Can you describe what the "video deficit" is and what it means about the capacity of children to learn from TV or computers?
The "video deficit" is the term given to a problem that comes up in toddlers, and in early preschoolers, up to maybe age 3. When children are offered the chance to learn a simple task on a video screen -- say a toy being taken apart in a couple of steps -- they don't learn it as fast as they would if a person was sitting across the table from them showing them exactly the same thing. They're just not pulling out as much information from the video version as they are from the in-person, real-life interaction.
Researchers are still trying to figure out why this is. Judy DeLoache, at the University of Virginia, and Georgene Troseth, at Vanderbilt, tried to trick children into thinking that they're looking through a window, instead of at a screen. They put a screen that's almost the same dimensions as a regular window, and put curtains around it, and made it look as if the children are looking out a window at a scene, say a room with toys in it. What's interesting is when the children don't think that they're looking at video, they can learn more from it.
What are some strategies that parents of young kids can employ for their kids to use media well?
I learned a lot from talking to other parents. For some parents, they would just make sure that they used the video at the same time every day -- in the morning before breakfast, or when Dad is making dinner. It was an activity that you do in an encapsulated time period.
Often the video is going when a parent is in the room. Yes, they might need to be on the phone, or they're unloading the dishwasher. But they are still aware of what their child is seeing on-screen, and so they're still making comments, when they can, about what the child is seeing. They're still to some degree helping to do that pointing and labeling that we know is so helpful for kids.
So, no, they're not sitting on the couch 100 percent of the time in rapt attention. But what they are doing is: "Did you see the way that teddy bear shared his snack? Wasn't that a nice thing to do?" I know that sounds simple, but those moments matter.
What does the research say about how TV and computers contributes to obesity epidemic?
I found this really fascinating and perplexing. What the studies show is that there does not seem to be an association between the amount of time spent watching TV, and the amount of time spent in active play, at least in children under the age of 5, which runs contrary to what we're hearing out there, that we're raising a generation of couch potatoes and video game addicts who aren't going out to the playground anymore.
There was a large gathering of pediatricians, development psychologists, food marketers and consultants on educational programming, sponsored by the Institute of Medicine, which looked at over 100 studies to find out what part the media is playing in the obesity epidemic. The report that came out of that group basically homed right in on the marketing of high-fat and high-sugar foods. It said that there just isn't a lot of data out there to show that TV is replacing activity to the extent we thought it was. So, let's look at the marketing instead.
You argue that many interactive games for kids are actually quite limited in the participation that they invite from children, despite their vaunted quality of being interactive. What does it mean?
A lot of these new toys are trying to do things for young kids that they just may not be developmentally ready for. One really fascinating example comes from Carolyn Rovee-Collier, who did some of the earliest research on how babies learn cause and effect. She did some research using a train. There was a little switch used to turn on the train. She was trying to see if children at very young ages realize that they were the one making the train move, or that their actions were causing an effect. But what she discovered was that this little switch was so fascinating to the kids that they weren't even focused on the train. Moving the switch back and forth wasn't even supposed to be part of the experiment. It was just the way she, as the researcher, had set the thing up.
She told me: "I think that babies have plenty of ways to learn cause and effect." She suggests that parents experiment with the doorbell [instead of computer games]. "It's cheaper."
On bike paths, and federal money
The bicycle thief
Bike activists face an uphill climb against Transportation Secretary Mary Peters, who claims bike paths are not transportation and are stealing tax money from bridges and roads.
By Katharine Mieszkowski
Sep. 14, 2007 | Imagine you're the federal official in the Bush administration charged with overseeing the nation's transportation infrastructure. A major bridge collapses on an interstate highway during rush hour, killing 13 people and injuring an additional 100. Whom to blame? How about the nation's bicyclists and pedestrians!
The Minneapolis bridge collapse on Aug. 1 led Secretary of Transportation Mary Peters to publicly reflect on federal transportation spending priorities and conclude that those greedy bicyclists and pedestrians, not to mention museumgoers and historic preservationists, hog too much of the billions of federal dollars raised by the gas tax, money that should go to pave highways and bridges. Better still, Peters, a 2006 Bush appointee, apparently doesn't see biking and walking paths as part of transportation infrastructure at all.
In an Aug. 15 appearance on PBS's "NewsHour With Jim Lehrer," Peters spoke against a proposal to raise gas taxes to shore up the nation's aging infrastructure. The real problem, the secretary argued, is that only 60 percent of the current money raised by gas taxes goes to highways and bridges. She conveniently neglected to mention that about 30 percent of the money goes to public transit. She then went on to blast congressional earmarks, which dedicate 10 percent of the gas tax to some 6,000 other projects around the country. "There are museums that are being built with that money, bike paths, trails, repairing lighthouses. Those are some of the kind of things that that money is being spent on, as opposed to our infrastructure," she said. The secretary added that projects like bike paths and trails "are really not transportation."
Peters' comments set off an eruption of blogging, e-mailing and letter-writing among bike riders and activists, incensed that no matter how many times they burn calories instead of fossil fuels with the words "One Less Car" or "We're Not Holding Up the Traffic, We Are the Traffic" plastered on their helmets, their pedal pushing is not taken seriously as a form of transportation by the honchos in Washington, D.C.
Bike paths are not infrastructure? "There are hundreds of thousands of people who ride to work, and millions who walk to work every day, and the idea [that] that isn't transportation is ludicrous," says Andy Clarke, executive director of the League of American Bicyclists, who has biked to work for almost 20 years on a path paid for with federal dollars. Clarke fired off an angry letter to Peters, and invited the 25,000 members of his organization around the country to do the same. "The guy in his Humvee taking his videos back to the video store isn't any more legitimate a trip than the guy on the Raleigh taking his videos back," says Andy Thornley, program director for the San Francisco Bicycle Coalition.
In fact, only about 1.5 percent of federal transportation dollars go to fund bike paths and walking trails. In the meantime, 10 percent of all U.S. trips to work, school and the store occur on bike or foot, and bicyclists and pedestrians account for about 12 percent of annual traffic fatalities, according to the Federal Highway Administration. "We represent a disproportionate share of the injuries, and we get a minuscule share of the funds," says Robert Raburn, executive director of the East Bay Bike Coalition in the San Francisco Bay Area, who calls the Peters' comments "outrageous." Plus, he notes, with problems like global warming, the obesity epidemic and energy independence, shouldn't the U.S. secretary of transportation be praising biking, not complaining about it?
What really drives cyclists around the bend is that while they're doing their part to burn less fossil fuel -- cue slogan: "No Iraqis Died to Fuel This Bike" -- they're getting grief for being expensive from a profligate administration. "War spending, tax cuts for the rich, and gas taxes are all big sources of funding. Bike spending is not," fumes Michael Bluejay, an Austin, Texas, bike activist, in an e-mail. "The few pennies we toss toward bike projects is not enough to fix our nation's bridges, not by a freaking long shot."
One of the many communities that benefit from federal dollars for bicyclists and pedestrians is the very one where the bridge collapsed. For the St. Paul, Minn., program Bike/Walk Twin Cities, administered by Transit for Livable Communities, $21.5 million of federal dough is being spent to create bike lanes, connect existing walking and biking trails with one another, and install signage to alert drivers of the presence of bicyclists and walkers. Despite the cold winters, Minneapolis is something of a biking Mecca, with 2.4 percent of all trips to work made by bike, significantly higher than the national average of 0.4 percent, according to Joan Pasiuk, program director of Bike/Walk Twin Cities.
It's hard to argue that walking paths and bike trails are robbing federal coffers when states can't even spend all the federal money they've received to repair bridges in the first place. In 2006, state departments of transportation sent back $1 billion in unspent bridge funds to the federal government, according to the Federal Highway Administration. "The fact that there is a billion dollars of bridge repair money sloshing around in the system not being spent suggests that it's not the fault of bike trails," says Clarke.
Congressional Democrats agree. "It's a red herring to point to bike paths and even imply that if we didn't build another bike path we'd have all the money we need to fix our highways and bridges," says Jim Berard, communications director for the House Committee on Transportation and Infrastructure. "You can't build very many bridges with the amount of money that you would save if you didn't build any bike paths."
So why is Peters suddenly taking on bikes and pedestrians? Her comments are especially odd since she sang the praises of bikes as transportation in a speech at the National Bike Summit in Washington, in March 2002. Has she simply forgotten the glory of two wheels? One theory: Peters is on a campaign to quash the idea of raising the gas tax, as she editorialized recently in the Washington Post. A key proponent of raising the gas tax to fund bridge restorations in the wake of the Minneapolis bridge collapse is Democratic Rep. Jim Oberstar of Minnesota, who has advocated for bike and pedestrian paths in his district. By putting a culture-war spin on the bridge collapse, Peters is hoping to run his gas tax proposal off the road.
Does Peters herself buy this theory? Does she really think that bike paths do not qualify as transportation infrastructure? Why does she say that things like bike paths steal money from bridge repairs when states have more than enough money to fix bridges? The secretary would not respond, but Jennifer Hing, a spokesperson for the Department of Transportation's Office of Public Affairs in the Office of the Secretary, would. She answered all the specific questions with one resoundingly uninformative e-mail: "The federal government should set high standards for and invest in the ongoing safety, reliability and interconnection of the nation's transportation network. State and local communities should have the flexibility to then set local transportation priorities."
For their part, cyclists have been weaving through political land mines for decades. In the perennial struggle to gain public support for bike paths, they remain philosophical. Says Thornley of the San Francisco Bicycle Coalition: "Before there were automobiles, and after there will be automobiles, there will be bicycles moving people around for transportation."
‘You Don’t Have to Do Bad Things to Be in a Gang. You Don’t Have to Do Anything You Don’t Want to Do.’ (Part of a series on 17-year-olds)
‘You Don’t Have to Do Bad Things to Be in a Gang. You Don’t Have to Do Anything You Don’t Want to Do.’
Interviewed by ALEX MINDLIN
SARAH MOHESS, Jamaica, Queens
Jamaica High School
BORN Aug. 4, 1990
I’VE been in foster care twice — once when I was 10, and another time when I was 13, until I finally left to go to Philadelphia. I lived in the streets there for a good two weeks. Then I got a job off the books, and a nighttime job too, and then I enrolled in West Philadelphia High School, which was very hard, considering I needed an adult to get me enrolled.
Who did it? Me, myself and I. I pretended to be my grandmother.
When I got back from Philadelphia, I was 16, so they couldn’t make me to go back to foster care. I told them I was going AWOL, that I was not willing to stay in foster care.
I was born in Trinidad, and my heritage is Indian, but now I live in Jamaica, Queens, with my father and my grandmother.
There’s so many gangs around Jamaica, although I prefer the term street organization. MS-13, that’s a bunch of Salvadoreans, mostly on the Queens Village side. You’ve got L.B., Lost Boys. Then you have L.F., Lost Foundation, which hates L.B.
I’ve been around Bloods my whole life. Plus, many of my family members are Bloods. Getting in was a decision I made. I’ve seen their lifestyle of living, the good and the bad. I’ve seen what they stand for, and they don’t stand for anything bad. It’s just there’s always going to be these dumb knuckleheads trying to do something stupid.
I was only Blood for about three months. Now I’m in the Anti-Gang Violence Youth Initiative at SCAN New York. We create workshops to target gangs, saying, this is what they’re doing to us, this is how society is labeling us.
Also, the younger kids here, if we feel they’re at risk of joining a gang or going the wrong way, we sit down, we’re like peer mentors to them, we talk to them and let them know there’s somebody there that can relate to them.
Let me give you the 101. You don’t have to do bad things to be in a gang. You don’t have to do anything you don’t want to do. It’s a family to go to when you don’t have that family.
One of my friends gets whupped every day by his G — that’s his mentor in the street organization — because he’s not going to school. His mother’s crying every day because he doesn’t come home on time. Is that an actual bad thing, or is that the sort of thing a big brother would do to a little brother?
I ended up in the suspension school at SCAN because I got suspended for a year from Jamaica High School, which is one of the worst schools in Queens. I can’t really blame the school for how bad it is — I’ve got to blame the kids that go there, because the curriculum’s all the same in every school. But you can’t give the kids 100 percent blame because the teachers don’t care. At least that’s my opinion.
I got suspended on March 13. They wanted to kick me out of the school, but they didn’t get a chance, because I had eyewitnesses with me when the incident with another female happened. I got into a fight with her, but before I fought, I was like, “Listen, I want your verbal consent that you want to have a one-on-one, because I don’t do jumps.” I don’t like to jump people. If you can’t handle somebody one on one, you don’t have to fight. I had a lot of animosity towards her, because she was supposed to be my friend, and she backstabbed me with one of my exes.
Many gang members in my ’hood, this is how they look at it: As long as you don’t bother me, I’m not going to bother you. Isn’t that how a normal person lives their life? You’re minding your own business, I’m minding mine. But if you come up to them, they’re going to have to stick up for themselves.
The other day, it was 3 or 4 in the night, I’m walking home from my homegirl’s house, and I see an old white lady walking down the street. What the hell is she doing out at 3 or 4 in the morning? I’m talking about a shortie with a cane. And I’m just walking, smoking a cigarette, going to the crib on 90th Avenue, one of the darkest blocks.
All of a sudden a car pulls up, guy hops out. Girl hops out. Guy starts choking the lady. The girl starts trying to take her bag. The lady takes the cane and hits the girl in the leg. Now she’s trying to get the guy off her, but she’s too old to do it.
Now, down the block, I have a couple of my homies, they’re Blood. I don’t know how they heard it or if they were outside. All you see is two little 20-something-year-old dudes running up, knocking out the guy, slamming the girl on top of the car, and letting the old lady go and beating up the other two, because that was wrong, what they did.
They were like: “Yo, this is my ’hood. You’re not going to come in my ’hood and try to disrespect the members of my community.” Is that something bad that they did? No.
Calls for a Breakup Grow Ever Louder in Belgium
By ELAINE SCIOLINO
BRUSSELS, Sept. 16 — Belgium has given the world Audrey Hepburn, René Magritte, the saxophone and deep-fried potato slices that somehow are called French.
But the back story of this flat, Maryland-size country of 10.4 million is of a bad marriage writ large — two nationalities living together that cannot stand each other. Now, more than three months after a general election, Belgium has failed to create a government, producing a crisis so profound that it has led to a flood of warnings, predictions, even promises that the country is about to disappear.
“We are two different nations, an artificial state created as a buffer between big powers, and we have nothing in common except a king, chocolate and beer,” said Filip Dewinter, the leader of Vlaams Belang, or Flemish Bloc, the extreme-right, xenophobic Flemish party, in an interview. “It’s ‘bye-bye, Belgium’ time.”
Radical Flemish separatists like Mr. Dewinter want to slice the country horizontally along ethnic and economic lines: to the north, their beloved Flanders — where Dutch (known locally as Flemish) is spoken and money is increasingly made — and to the south, French-speaking Wallonia, where a kind of provincial snobbery was once polished to a fine sheen and where today old factories dominate the gray landscape.
“There are two extremes, some screaming that Belgium will last forever and others saying that we are standing at the edge of a ravine,” said Caroline Sägesser, a Belgian political analyst at Crisp, a socio-political research organization in Brussels. “I don’t believe Belgium is about to split up right now. But in my lifetime? I’d be surprised if I were to die in Belgium.”
With the headquarters of both NATO and the European Union in Brussels, the crisis is not limited to this country because it could embolden other European separatist movements, among them the Basques, the Lombards and the Catalans.
Since the kingdom of Belgium was created as an obstacle to French expansionism in 1830, it has struggled for cohesion. Anyone who has spoken French in a Flemish city quickly gets a sense of the mutual hostility that is a part of daily life here. The current crisis dates from June 10, when the Flemish Christian Democrats, who demand greater autonomy for Flanders, came in first with one-fifth of the seats in Parliament.
Yves Leterme, the party leader, would have become prime minister if he had been able to put together a coalition government.
But he was rejected by French speakers because of his contempt for them — an oddity since his own father is a French speaker. He further alienated them, and even some moderate Flemish leaders, on Belgium’s national holiday, July 21, when he appeared unable — or unwilling — to sing Belgium’s national anthem.
Belgium’s mild-mannered, 73-year-old king, Albert II, has struggled to mediate, even though under the Constitution he has no power other than to appoint ministers and rubber-stamp laws passed by Parliament. He has welcomed a parade of politicians and elder statesmen to the Belvedere palace in Brussels, successively appointing four political leaders to resolve the crisis. All have failed.
On one level, there is normalcy and calm here. The country is governed largely by a patchwork of regional bureaucracies, so trains run on time, mail is delivered, garbage is collected, the police keep order.
Officials from the former government — including former Prime Minister Guy Verhhofstadt, who is ethnically Flemish — report for work every day and continue to collect salaries. The former government is allowed to pay bills, carry out previously decided policies and make urgent decisions on peace and security.
Earlier this month, for example, the governing Council of Ministers approved the deployment of 80 to 100 peacekeeping troops to Chad and a six-month extension for 400 Belgian peacekeepers stationed in Lebanon under United Nations mandates.
But a new government will be needed to approve a budget for next year.
Certainly, there are reasons Belgium is likely to stay together, at least in the short term.
Brussels, the country’s overwhelmingly French-speaking capital, is in Flanders and historically was a Flemish-speaking city. There would be overwhelming local and international resistance to turning Brussels into the capital of a country called Flanders.
The economies of the two regions are inextricably intertwined, and separation would be a fiscal nightmare.
Then there is the issue of the national debt (90 percent of Belgium’s gross domestic product) and how to divide it equitably.
But there is also deep resentment in Flanders that its much healthier economy must subsidize the French-speaking south, where unemployment is double that of the north.
[A poll by the private Field Research Institute released on Tuesday indicated that 66 percent of the inhabitants of Flanders believe that the country will split up “sooner or later,” and 46 percent favor such a division. The poll, which was conducted by telephone, interviewed 1,000 people.]
French speakers, meanwhile, favor the status quo. “Ladies and gentlemen, everything’s fine!” exclaimed Mayor Jacques Étienne of Namur, the Walloon capital, at the annual Walloon festival last Saturday.
Acknowledging that talk of a “divorce” had returned, he reminded the audience that this was a day to celebrate, saying, “We have to, if possible, forget about our personal worries and the anxieties of our time.”
Belgium has suffered through previous political crises and threats of partition. But a number of political analysts believe this one is different.
The turning point is widely believed to have been last December when RTBF, a French-language public television channel, broadcast a hoax on the breakup of Belgium.
The two-hour live television report showed images of cheering, flag-waving Flemish nationalists and crowds of French-speaking Walloons preparing to leave, while also reporting that the king had fled the country.
Panicked viewers called the station, and the prime minister’s office condemned the program as irresponsible and tasteless. But for the first time, in the public imagination, the possibility of a breakup seemed real.
Contributing to the difficulty in forming a new government now is the fact that all 11 parties in the national Parliament are local, not national, parties. The country has eight regional or language-based parliaments.
Oddly, there is no panic just now, just exasperation and a hint of embarrassment. “We must not worry too much,” said Baudouin Bruggeman, a 55-year-old schoolteacher, as he sipped Champagne at the festival in Namur. “Belgium has survived on compromise since 1830. Everyone puffs himself up in this banana republic. You have to remember that this is Magritte country, the country of surrealism. Anything can happen.”
An article on TV for tots
Should tots watch TV?
Most kids under 2 are parked in front of the electronic babysitter every day. Author Lisa Guernsey explains how the tube impacts the smallest couch potatoes.
By Katharine Mieszkowski
Sep. 14, 2007 | Journalist Lisa Guernsey's first child was just 5 weeks old and colicky when a sympathetic friend introduced the harried new mom to "baby crack," better known as Baby Mozart. The baby-crack-pusher promised that this video for infants and toddlers could buy Guernsey and her daughter some temporary relief. So, Guernsey popped that sucker in the VCR, and along with her 5-week-old, went down the rabbit hole into the strange, fun-house world of children's media, where you're never too young to be plugged in.
As a reporter for the New York Times, Guernsey had covered personal technology, digital media and electronic toys. For her new book, "Into the Minds of Babes: How Screen Time Affects Children From Birth to Age Five," she scrutinized the most recent research on kids' videos, TV, interactive games and Web sites to try to suss out what infants and toddlers actually comprehend when they look at the screen, and how it impacts them, for good or ill. The book draws on interviews with child psychologists and parents, as well as her own experiences raising two daughters, now ages 3 and 5.
Guernsey comes off as neither an opponent of kids under 5 watching videos -- her own did, and still do -- nor as an apologist for the much-hyped educational claims of many baby videos and interactive games. Notably, she finds as much for parents to be concerned about in background television (when a TV is just left turned on for hours on end even if no one is watching it) as anything that's explicitly made for young kids.
Salon reached Guernsey by phone at her home office in Alexandria, Va., where she argued that letting your child watch the tube won't warp her developing brain, yet it's unlikely to give her a leg up on language development either.
The American Academy of Pediatrics recommends that children under age 2 watch no TV and spend no time in front of the computer. Yet, 60 percent of parents allow their kids under 2 to watch some TV or video every day. What do you make of this discrepancy?
I found that it's pretty unrealistic for most families to keep TV away from their youngest kids, even in well-meaning ways. Many households use the television for information and entertainment, and to find out what the weather is going to be like.
Is there any evidence that young kids today actually spend more time in front of the TV screen than kids the same age did 30 years ago?
I really tried to figure that out. I kept thinking: "Is it just that we have nostalgia for some bygone day when children were forever playing with pots and pans on the floor? Or, are we forgetting that even in the '60s and '70s, there was television on when toddlers were around?"
I never came up with a satisfactory answer. But what I did find is that even some studies looking at time spent in front of the TV back in the '90s showed more television use among young kids, before the days of Baby Einstein, than today.
Do you see videos for very young children as a convenience for the parents rather than as a benefit for the child?
Parents, myself included, have used video to take a breath, to make a bunch of phone calls that they need to make, to unload the dishwasher. I think that video, certainly with these younger ages, is being used as a way to buy some time.
There was a recent study from the University of Washington, which found that Baby Einstein may actually hinder children's language development, leading bloggers to cackle "Baby Einstein makes baby stupid!" Did you find any evidence that Baby Einstein is beneficial in anyway?
I did not. What I did find is that videos like Baby Einstein that may purport to stimulate cognitive development or language learning may not be designed using the principles that developmental psychologists know apply to these very young children.
An example is the way that children learn language. The more a caregiver points to and labels what they're talking about -- "Here's an apple. Do you want an apple for your lunch? It's a red apple" -- and the more the child is able to see that apple at the exact same time those words are being said, the more children will learn. They'll get the word "apple." They'll start to understand the color red. But a lot of these videos are not designed with those principles in mind.
You debunk a lot of the popular beliefs about the bad things TV does to kids, for instance, the idea that when kids watch TV they turn into zoned-out "zombies," or catch attention deficit hyperactivity disorder [ADHD]. What's the evidence that's not true?
Those were two things that I worried about a lot as a mom. There are no studies that show television causing attention problems. All we have is a link, an association. The more that I talked to experts on ADHD, I found a lot of reason to think that children who have attention problems are either more attracted to television, or their parents use the television more in their households.
Because the parents need a break from the ADHD kids?
It may be hard to focus those kids' attention on a book, it's hard to get them to stay in one place in the room. Perhaps the parents of children like that are finding: "OK, at least I can get 30 minutes or an hour of peace if we turn on the TV."
The other piece is the fact that ADHD has a genetic component. Many researchers see that people with ADHD use the television more, they have it on in their houses more often. So, you have the ADHD parent, who then has the TV on more often in their house, and they're caring for a young child. But to say that looking at a screen for 30 minutes a day is going to cause attention problems, there's just no evidence of that at all.
What about the zombie theory?
The zombie effect is the idea that children mentally clock out when they're watching TV, that they're intellectually vacant.
In fact, what I found is more and more research that shows how mentally engaged children are, particularly after age 2 and a half to 3. They're really trying to figure out what they're seeing on the screen. There are studies done on "Sesame Street" that showed that children could clearly detect a difference at very young ages between a scrambled version of "Sesame Street" and the real one. The fact that they can make that distinction is proof that when they're watching, they're engaged.
At 30 months, that's when a lot of children start to understand that this happened, and then this happened, then that happened. Dan Anderson at the University of Massachusetts, a researcher who has done just decades of work in this area, has found that at about 30 months, when children start wanting to actually sit through a whole book, that's often when they start to be more and more attracted to TV.
They'll want to see how a show ends, and they'll become very upset if you try to turn off "Dora the Explorer" in the middle of the show. They can get that Dora is on a journey to a place, or she's trying to solve a puzzle, and they need to see what happens next.
The flip side, though, is that kids younger that that can't tell the difference when researchers rearrange the sequence of a show, right?
Particularly the youngest ones. In a study done by Dan Anderson, he took "Teletubbies," and he cut it up. He made the sequence not make any sense. What he found was that at 12 months, the children who were watching the scrambled versions showed no signs of seeing that it was any different than the regular.
That doesn't mean that if they see a blue ball, they're not processing maybe color or shape. We don't know exactly what they're getting. But we do know that they're not understanding that the stories being told on video mean something.
In "Everything Bad Is Good For You: How Today's Popular Culture Is Actually Making Us Smarter," writer Steven Johnson argues that the complexity of contemporary TV shows, like "The Sopranos" or "The West Wing," makes viewers smarter. Yet, you found that when it comes to very young kids, children only benefit from the simplest narratives, without a lot of jump cuts.
Children at these young ages need to see things at the pace of normal life, and see that they're going from point A to point B. For young kids, particularly under the age of 4, they're not getting some of the more abstract notions that adults take away from TV -- a character's motivation, for instance. They're not seeing that this character may look kind of evil, but in fact he's trying to help the victim. All they're seeing is long teeth on a dog, or a scary-looking house. Everything is so literal to them.
Anything that is abstract, or anything that is being talked about but not present on the screen, is very likely going over their heads. I've seen this even in shows that are designed for preschoolers, like "Bob the Builder."
You report that in 39 percent of households with kids under age 4 the TV is on most or all of the time. What are the impacts of so-called background TV on young kids?
I think that we're spending too much time talking about baby videos, and not enough talking about background television. There are three places in which we already have evidence of a negative impact.
The first is on the way a child plays, and the amount of time that a young child, a toddler even, spends with a toy. When there is, say, "Jeopardy" going on in the background, the kids go from one toy to another toy to another. And they're not taking as much time with the toy to explore it, or play with it as they would be if the TV was off.
Secondly, parents interact less with their children when the TV is on in the background. And to me that was a no-brainer, because I'm just as susceptible to being distracted by the television as my kids are. But I would have days where I had the TV on and my 18-month-old would be kind of just pushing a toy around the room. And I'd say: "She's fine. She's not even interested in this program." But what I didn't realize, then, is: How is it changing the way that I interact with her? Is it changing the length of time that I might talk to her about something she sees?
Then, the third piece is on language development. Studies on background noise have shown that infants and toddlers have a very hard time hearing the words in speech when they have noise to compete with, when there is background noise. One study from the University of Maryland showed that 7-and-a half-month-old infants could not segment speech very well when there was background chatter. That means that they couldn't catch a word in a sentence. It was just kind of all running together for them.
So, even when your child isn't paying attention to the TV, the sound of it may be having an impact?
I changed my habits at home, after I discovered some of this research. I started becoming much more thoughtful about when I was really listening to the radio, and turning it off when I really wasn't listening. I wanted my children to hear my voice, and only my voice sometimes. I wanted some quiet in the house.
Do you think that kids who are older than age 2 who aren't exposed to any educational TV are missing out? Or, does that all depend on what they're doing instead?
I certainly don't want to judge anybody's family, and how they decide to use TV, but I do now have much more appreciation for well-made shows.
I know that "Blue's Clues" is really well made. I know that there is solid research that shows that it helps children have more flexible thinking. So, I think that maybe 30 minutes of "Blue's Clues" at this moment may be better than them dealing with me being stressed out, and trying to call my health insurance company at the same time that I'm supposed to be interacting with them. When I have those kind of trade-offs to make, when there's a well-made show that I can pop in, I'm going to go for that video.
I look for signs that the show is designed to elicit participation from my daughters. Sometimes that means a character facing the screen, talking out to the audience, and asking a question. Sometimes it's even cartoon characters that do that, like Dora the Explorer. Twenty-four-month-olds really are able to transfer knowledge from the screen to their world, if they are participating and engaged in a conversation with the person on the screen. Just the simple act of talking back to the screen, like shouting out an answer, shows that they're mentally engaged.
What are some signs that a video might be over the head of a young child?
Media that's a little bit frightening, parents watch and say: "Oh, but everyone is OK in the end, and look, he was just pretending." However, children at these young ages often don't remember anything about the resolution, or the motivation, or the plot.
Parents who say, "It's not real. It's not real. Don't worry, it's not real," to really young kids, that kind of information just doesn't help them. They don't know what is real, and what isn't real. There is some research out there that shows it's not until kindergarten or elementary school that children really start to understand the difference between things that are real and things that are fantasy.
So, I think that a sign of a program that is not really designed well for kids is one that unnecessarily scares them; even though it may all look good in the end, all it's done is given them a scary image, and that's probably all they're going to remember.
Can you describe what the "video deficit" is and what it means about the capacity of children to learn from TV or computers?
The "video deficit" is the term given to a problem that comes up in toddlers, and in early preschoolers, up to maybe age 3. When children are offered the chance to learn a simple task on a video screen -- say a toy being taken apart in a couple of steps -- they don't learn it as fast as they would if a person was sitting across the table from them showing them exactly the same thing. They're just not pulling out as much information from the video version as they are from the in-person, real-life interaction.
Researchers are still trying to figure out why this is. Judy DeLoache, at the University of Virginia, and Georgene Troseth, at Vanderbilt, tried to trick children into thinking that they're looking through a window, instead of at a screen. They put a screen that's almost the same dimensions as a regular window, and put curtains around it, and made it look as if the children are looking out a window at a scene, say a room with toys in it. What's interesting is when the children don't think that they're looking at video, they can learn more from it.
What are some strategies that parents of young kids can employ for their kids to use media well?
I learned a lot from talking to other parents. For some parents, they would just make sure that they used the video at the same time every day -- in the morning before breakfast, or when Dad is making dinner. It was an activity that you do in an encapsulated time period.
Often the video is going when a parent is in the room. Yes, they might need to be on the phone, or they're unloading the dishwasher. But they are still aware of what their child is seeing on-screen, and so they're still making comments, when they can, about what the child is seeing. They're still to some degree helping to do that pointing and labeling that we know is so helpful for kids.
So, no, they're not sitting on the couch 100 percent of the time in rapt attention. But what they are doing is: "Did you see the way that teddy bear shared his snack? Wasn't that a nice thing to do?" I know that sounds simple, but those moments matter.
What does the research say about how TV and computers contributes to obesity epidemic?
I found this really fascinating and perplexing. What the studies show is that there does not seem to be an association between the amount of time spent watching TV, and the amount of time spent in active play, at least in children under the age of 5, which runs contrary to what we're hearing out there, that we're raising a generation of couch potatoes and video game addicts who aren't going out to the playground anymore.
There was a large gathering of pediatricians, development psychologists, food marketers and consultants on educational programming, sponsored by the Institute of Medicine, which looked at over 100 studies to find out what part the media is playing in the obesity epidemic. The report that came out of that group basically homed right in on the marketing of high-fat and high-sugar foods. It said that there just isn't a lot of data out there to show that TV is replacing activity to the extent we thought it was. So, let's look at the marketing instead.
You argue that many interactive games for kids are actually quite limited in the participation that they invite from children, despite their vaunted quality of being interactive. What does it mean?
A lot of these new toys are trying to do things for young kids that they just may not be developmentally ready for. One really fascinating example comes from Carolyn Rovee-Collier, who did some of the earliest research on how babies learn cause and effect. She did some research using a train. There was a little switch used to turn on the train. She was trying to see if children at very young ages realize that they were the one making the train move, or that their actions were causing an effect. But what she discovered was that this little switch was so fascinating to the kids that they weren't even focused on the train. Moving the switch back and forth wasn't even supposed to be part of the experiment. It was just the way she, as the researcher, had set the thing up.
She told me: "I think that babies have plenty of ways to learn cause and effect." She suggests that parents experiment with the doorbell [instead of computer games]. "It's cheaper."
On bike paths, and federal money
The bicycle thief
Bike activists face an uphill climb against Transportation Secretary Mary Peters, who claims bike paths are not transportation and are stealing tax money from bridges and roads.
By Katharine Mieszkowski
Sep. 14, 2007 | Imagine you're the federal official in the Bush administration charged with overseeing the nation's transportation infrastructure. A major bridge collapses on an interstate highway during rush hour, killing 13 people and injuring an additional 100. Whom to blame? How about the nation's bicyclists and pedestrians!
The Minneapolis bridge collapse on Aug. 1 led Secretary of Transportation Mary Peters to publicly reflect on federal transportation spending priorities and conclude that those greedy bicyclists and pedestrians, not to mention museumgoers and historic preservationists, hog too much of the billions of federal dollars raised by the gas tax, money that should go to pave highways and bridges. Better still, Peters, a 2006 Bush appointee, apparently doesn't see biking and walking paths as part of transportation infrastructure at all.
In an Aug. 15 appearance on PBS's "NewsHour With Jim Lehrer," Peters spoke against a proposal to raise gas taxes to shore up the nation's aging infrastructure. The real problem, the secretary argued, is that only 60 percent of the current money raised by gas taxes goes to highways and bridges. She conveniently neglected to mention that about 30 percent of the money goes to public transit. She then went on to blast congressional earmarks, which dedicate 10 percent of the gas tax to some 6,000 other projects around the country. "There are museums that are being built with that money, bike paths, trails, repairing lighthouses. Those are some of the kind of things that that money is being spent on, as opposed to our infrastructure," she said. The secretary added that projects like bike paths and trails "are really not transportation."
Peters' comments set off an eruption of blogging, e-mailing and letter-writing among bike riders and activists, incensed that no matter how many times they burn calories instead of fossil fuels with the words "One Less Car" or "We're Not Holding Up the Traffic, We Are the Traffic" plastered on their helmets, their pedal pushing is not taken seriously as a form of transportation by the honchos in Washington, D.C.
Bike paths are not infrastructure? "There are hundreds of thousands of people who ride to work, and millions who walk to work every day, and the idea [that] that isn't transportation is ludicrous," says Andy Clarke, executive director of the League of American Bicyclists, who has biked to work for almost 20 years on a path paid for with federal dollars. Clarke fired off an angry letter to Peters, and invited the 25,000 members of his organization around the country to do the same. "The guy in his Humvee taking his videos back to the video store isn't any more legitimate a trip than the guy on the Raleigh taking his videos back," says Andy Thornley, program director for the San Francisco Bicycle Coalition.
In fact, only about 1.5 percent of federal transportation dollars go to fund bike paths and walking trails. In the meantime, 10 percent of all U.S. trips to work, school and the store occur on bike or foot, and bicyclists and pedestrians account for about 12 percent of annual traffic fatalities, according to the Federal Highway Administration. "We represent a disproportionate share of the injuries, and we get a minuscule share of the funds," says Robert Raburn, executive director of the East Bay Bike Coalition in the San Francisco Bay Area, who calls the Peters' comments "outrageous." Plus, he notes, with problems like global warming, the obesity epidemic and energy independence, shouldn't the U.S. secretary of transportation be praising biking, not complaining about it?
What really drives cyclists around the bend is that while they're doing their part to burn less fossil fuel -- cue slogan: "No Iraqis Died to Fuel This Bike" -- they're getting grief for being expensive from a profligate administration. "War spending, tax cuts for the rich, and gas taxes are all big sources of funding. Bike spending is not," fumes Michael Bluejay, an Austin, Texas, bike activist, in an e-mail. "The few pennies we toss toward bike projects is not enough to fix our nation's bridges, not by a freaking long shot."
One of the many communities that benefit from federal dollars for bicyclists and pedestrians is the very one where the bridge collapsed. For the St. Paul, Minn., program Bike/Walk Twin Cities, administered by Transit for Livable Communities, $21.5 million of federal dough is being spent to create bike lanes, connect existing walking and biking trails with one another, and install signage to alert drivers of the presence of bicyclists and walkers. Despite the cold winters, Minneapolis is something of a biking Mecca, with 2.4 percent of all trips to work made by bike, significantly higher than the national average of 0.4 percent, according to Joan Pasiuk, program director of Bike/Walk Twin Cities.
It's hard to argue that walking paths and bike trails are robbing federal coffers when states can't even spend all the federal money they've received to repair bridges in the first place. In 2006, state departments of transportation sent back $1 billion in unspent bridge funds to the federal government, according to the Federal Highway Administration. "The fact that there is a billion dollars of bridge repair money sloshing around in the system not being spent suggests that it's not the fault of bike trails," says Clarke.
Congressional Democrats agree. "It's a red herring to point to bike paths and even imply that if we didn't build another bike path we'd have all the money we need to fix our highways and bridges," says Jim Berard, communications director for the House Committee on Transportation and Infrastructure. "You can't build very many bridges with the amount of money that you would save if you didn't build any bike paths."
So why is Peters suddenly taking on bikes and pedestrians? Her comments are especially odd since she sang the praises of bikes as transportation in a speech at the National Bike Summit in Washington, in March 2002. Has she simply forgotten the glory of two wheels? One theory: Peters is on a campaign to quash the idea of raising the gas tax, as she editorialized recently in the Washington Post. A key proponent of raising the gas tax to fund bridge restorations in the wake of the Minneapolis bridge collapse is Democratic Rep. Jim Oberstar of Minnesota, who has advocated for bike and pedestrian paths in his district. By putting a culture-war spin on the bridge collapse, Peters is hoping to run his gas tax proposal off the road.
Does Peters herself buy this theory? Does she really think that bike paths do not qualify as transportation infrastructure? Why does she say that things like bike paths steal money from bridge repairs when states have more than enough money to fix bridges? The secretary would not respond, but Jennifer Hing, a spokesperson for the Department of Transportation's Office of Public Affairs in the Office of the Secretary, would. She answered all the specific questions with one resoundingly uninformative e-mail: "The federal government should set high standards for and invest in the ongoing safety, reliability and interconnection of the nation's transportation network. State and local communities should have the flexibility to then set local transportation priorities."
For their part, cyclists have been weaving through political land mines for decades. In the perennial struggle to gain public support for bike paths, they remain philosophical. Says Thornley of the San Francisco Bicycle Coalition: "Before there were automobiles, and after there will be automobiles, there will be bicycles moving people around for transportation."
‘You Don’t Have to Do Bad Things to Be in a Gang. You Don’t Have to Do Anything You Don’t Want to Do.’ (Part of a series on 17-year-olds)
‘You Don’t Have to Do Bad Things to Be in a Gang. You Don’t Have to Do Anything You Don’t Want to Do.’
Interviewed by ALEX MINDLIN
SARAH MOHESS, Jamaica, Queens
Jamaica High School
BORN Aug. 4, 1990
I’VE been in foster care twice — once when I was 10, and another time when I was 13, until I finally left to go to Philadelphia. I lived in the streets there for a good two weeks. Then I got a job off the books, and a nighttime job too, and then I enrolled in West Philadelphia High School, which was very hard, considering I needed an adult to get me enrolled.
Who did it? Me, myself and I. I pretended to be my grandmother.
When I got back from Philadelphia, I was 16, so they couldn’t make me to go back to foster care. I told them I was going AWOL, that I was not willing to stay in foster care.
I was born in Trinidad, and my heritage is Indian, but now I live in Jamaica, Queens, with my father and my grandmother.
There’s so many gangs around Jamaica, although I prefer the term street organization. MS-13, that’s a bunch of Salvadoreans, mostly on the Queens Village side. You’ve got L.B., Lost Boys. Then you have L.F., Lost Foundation, which hates L.B.
I’ve been around Bloods my whole life. Plus, many of my family members are Bloods. Getting in was a decision I made. I’ve seen their lifestyle of living, the good and the bad. I’ve seen what they stand for, and they don’t stand for anything bad. It’s just there’s always going to be these dumb knuckleheads trying to do something stupid.
I was only Blood for about three months. Now I’m in the Anti-Gang Violence Youth Initiative at SCAN New York. We create workshops to target gangs, saying, this is what they’re doing to us, this is how society is labeling us.
Also, the younger kids here, if we feel they’re at risk of joining a gang or going the wrong way, we sit down, we’re like peer mentors to them, we talk to them and let them know there’s somebody there that can relate to them.
Let me give you the 101. You don’t have to do bad things to be in a gang. You don’t have to do anything you don’t want to do. It’s a family to go to when you don’t have that family.
One of my friends gets whupped every day by his G — that’s his mentor in the street organization — because he’s not going to school. His mother’s crying every day because he doesn’t come home on time. Is that an actual bad thing, or is that the sort of thing a big brother would do to a little brother?
I ended up in the suspension school at SCAN because I got suspended for a year from Jamaica High School, which is one of the worst schools in Queens. I can’t really blame the school for how bad it is — I’ve got to blame the kids that go there, because the curriculum’s all the same in every school. But you can’t give the kids 100 percent blame because the teachers don’t care. At least that’s my opinion.
I got suspended on March 13. They wanted to kick me out of the school, but they didn’t get a chance, because I had eyewitnesses with me when the incident with another female happened. I got into a fight with her, but before I fought, I was like, “Listen, I want your verbal consent that you want to have a one-on-one, because I don’t do jumps.” I don’t like to jump people. If you can’t handle somebody one on one, you don’t have to fight. I had a lot of animosity towards her, because she was supposed to be my friend, and she backstabbed me with one of my exes.
Many gang members in my ’hood, this is how they look at it: As long as you don’t bother me, I’m not going to bother you. Isn’t that how a normal person lives their life? You’re minding your own business, I’m minding mine. But if you come up to them, they’re going to have to stick up for themselves.
The other day, it was 3 or 4 in the night, I’m walking home from my homegirl’s house, and I see an old white lady walking down the street. What the hell is she doing out at 3 or 4 in the morning? I’m talking about a shortie with a cane. And I’m just walking, smoking a cigarette, going to the crib on 90th Avenue, one of the darkest blocks.
All of a sudden a car pulls up, guy hops out. Girl hops out. Guy starts choking the lady. The girl starts trying to take her bag. The lady takes the cane and hits the girl in the leg. Now she’s trying to get the guy off her, but she’s too old to do it.
Now, down the block, I have a couple of my homies, they’re Blood. I don’t know how they heard it or if they were outside. All you see is two little 20-something-year-old dudes running up, knocking out the guy, slamming the girl on top of the car, and letting the old lady go and beating up the other two, because that was wrong, what they did.
They were like: “Yo, this is my ’hood. You’re not going to come in my ’hood and try to disrespect the members of my community.” Is that something bad that they did? No.
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no subject
Date: 2007-09-22 06:02 pm (UTC)Let's just shut them all off, then, and see what happens to shipping.
Oh wait, ships aren't cars, so they don't count.
So let's not let anything into the USA by ship any more, either.
no subject
Date: 2007-09-22 06:02 pm (UTC)Let's just shut them all off, then, and see what happens to shipping.
Oh wait, ships aren't cars, so they don't count.
So let's not let anything into the USA by ship any more, either.