Blog

I’m pleased to note that I’m joining the Palladium-Item‘s community editorial advisory board.  This comes after a number of conversations with the paper’s staff about the role of the editorial page and its advisory board in prompting and shaping community dialog; I’m excited that I will get to contribute to those efforts in this new way.

The board is a volunteer group of community members who meet regularly with the paper’s editorial staff to discuss issues facing our area, and to help ensure that the viewpoints expressed by the paper are the result of careful consideration and broad consultation.  In the end, it’s the Palladium-Item staff (and not the advisory board members) who craft the resulting columns, but Dale McConnaughay and others responsible for that task rely on the input received (and strong disagreements aired) through the board’s private conversations.  They also regularly invite community leaders to meet with the board for updates and discussion about projects underway.

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It feels worth noticing the parts of our lives that are set up to make some regular use of disposable items.  Whether it’s plastic bottles of water, plastic bags at the grocery or styrofoam coffee cups, there are a lot of things we use once or only a few times and then throw away when we don’t necessarily need to.

Recently I went looking for a more sustainable way to shave, so that I didn’t have to throw away as many of those ridiculously expensive blade cartridges.

At some points in life I’ve used an electric razor, which had fewer parts that needed regular replacing.  I suppose you could try to make the case that a really well-engineered electric razor with a long-lasting battery could end up being lower resource usage than the manual razor with cartridges, but as electric razors got more crazy in their design (“buy this special gel-pack that only fits this one model of razor so it can automatically douse your face with soothing chemicals at just the right time!”) it felt simpler – and, okay, a little more manly – to just drag a blade across my face by hand.

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Indiana Senator Mike Delph from District 29 has introduced Senate Bill 146 which would remove the option of straight party ticket voting from Indiana election ballots.  As Doug Masson notes, this change would probably favor the Republican party in most districts.

I think straight party ticket ballots generally only do a disservice to Indiana voters.

At best, it enables a kind of impulsive loyalty to a vague label that can mean very different things to different people.

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On Saturday December 31st, President Obama signed into law the National Defense Authorization Act for Fiscal Year 2012, which authorizes indefinite military detention without trial of American citizens, among other things.  The president’s signature was accompanied by a signing statement noting serious reservations, saying “The fact that I support this bill as a whole does not mean I agree with everything in it.”

For the moment, let’s put aside the horrifying fact that such a bill was even earnestly discussed or advanced in Congress, or that indefinite detention without a trial of anyone is something we’re willing to entertain as acceptable.  Let’s put aside the disturbing practice of folding fundamental changes to U.S. military and legal policy into what are essentially administrative budgeting conversations.  And let’s pretend that the president didn’t sign such a groundbreaking bill on a holiday, a Saturday when most of the country was known to be preoccupied with celebrating the particulars of the Gregorian calendar.

All those things aside, President Obama still signed a bill that he says he disagrees with.   That’s fine if the bill says that unicorns might exist or that the White House will be painted green; sign it, put it in a file somewhere, work out the details later.  But a bill that authorizes the indefinite detention of U.S. citizens without trial seems like it deserves a lot more than the “I don’t like it but I guess it’s what we have to do” treatment.

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The new calendar year is a great time to think about how you manage your personal and work/organizational email accounts.  I know that I benefit from the opportunity to purge or rotate out some old folders, delete large attachments just sitting around taking up space, and think about how well my setup is working for me in my daily workflow.

There are a lot of different strategies out there and each person has to find what works best for them.  Here are a few queries that might help you think about how well your strategy is working for you:

1. Are you able to work through your e-mail inbox in a reasonable amount of time every day, respond to or delegate time-sensitive questions/comments, convert messages into to-do items, or otherwise file them away on the first pass through?
2. Do you make good use of e-mail filters available in your mail reading program to highlight/tag/sort messages in ways that make you more productive? Continue Reading

It’s “year in review” week!

There’s just enough time between the Christmas holiday and New Year’s Eve for people to get bored, but it’s not a good time to launch new TV shows or announce new political initiatives, so we have to have something to keep us entertained.

(As a kid this meant me listening to countdowns of the top one billion songs on the charts for that year, and somehow a Celine Dion or Aaron Neville song always made it into the top five…this was painful, but perhaps reflects more poorly on me and the particular genre of music station I was listening to than it does on all of the music produced in those years.)

But it’s been an unusually full year for me, so I thought I’d take a moment to reflect back on what that has included:
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Today’s Palladium-Item editorial “Politics cheats citizens” calls out the ways in which local political maneuvering can do a disservice to voters, in this case with the less-than-transparent approach that was taken to handling the unfortunate health issues affecting Richmond City Council’s District 5 representative, Bing Welch, during the recent election campaign:

Whether it is the 2009 Christmas Eve Senate passage of a huge, and hugely controversial, health care reform measure by Democrats narrowly controlling the U.S. Senate or, closer to home, Republicans and Democrats waiting until after a general election to craft their respective political handiwork, this is the stuff that alienates and isolates the public from those who have sworn to represent their best interests.

Through any such conversation we must of course be sensitive to Mr. Welch’s experience along the way.  I certainly wish him the best in recovering his health, and appreciate the years of time and service he has given to the Richmond community and the residents of District 5.  It’s not easy to be a political figure in the public spotlight even when you’re healthy, and so we know that it must have been particularly hard on Bing and his family to have health concerns and questions about his ability to serve in that role all mixed in together.

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I work in a world with a lot of artificially constructed structures and images, and those structures and images have a lot of straight lines, right angles and cold, industrial, unfeeling surfaces.  Computer monitors, e-mail composition windows, 8 1/2 x 11 paper with black lines on it, rectangular desks, rectangular parking spaces in dark grey rectangular parking garages, and so on.

It’s also the case that I try to do creative work: building interactive and engaging websites, collaborating with people to find innovative solutions to challenging problems, creative writing, creative thinking, and more.

Sometimes it can be a challenge to do creative work surrounded by pieces of infrastructure that don’t elicit creativity, and that sometimes even discourage it.

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I’m really glad that most all U.S. military forces are leaving Iraq this month; this is long past due.

Most of the media coverage this week seems to be glossing over the significant detail that the U.S. investment in Iraq, in terms of personnel and dollars, will continue.  Instead of uniformed troops from the military, we’ll have 15,000-16,000 people there in the form of other government employees and private contractors.  We’ll be spending almost $4 billion there in 2012.  These numbers are lower than what we’ve been investing, but they are not small numbers, and they still represent a significant commitment on the part of U.S. taxpayers, let alone on the part of the soldiers still on the ground.  We can’t afford to start thinking or talking as though our involvement in Iraq is through.

It also seems appropriate that when we talk about the human life lost in the course of the U.S. presence in Iraq, we avoid artificial exclusions based on nationality.  The story and cost of war is incomplete if you only recognize the count of killed and wounded on one “side” of any conflict.  As we consider this particular milestone, let us reflect on the totality of what has been sacrificed, taken or destroyed along the way.

When you walk into Shane Eddington’s office at the Whitewater Valley Pro Bono offices in downtown Richmond, the scene is a little like something out of a John Grisham novel: the heroic lawyer working away at all hours amid piles of legal documents in a windowless office with just one assistant on staff, trying to help the most vulnerable members of our community who couldn’t otherwise afford legal services.  Divorces, custody battles, landlord-tenant disputes, managing the assets of the departed and other various issues come across his desk all day long; most of the people he sees can’t afford to pay much of anything, but really need his help.

Even if Eddington’s role as Executive Director of the organization isn’t as dramatic as you’d find in a legal thriller, the need for reduced rate or free legal services in our area has never been greater, and the prospects for funding sources to meet those needs are changing rapidly.

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