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GW says Yes!
I heard the news today, oh boy:
It is my pleasure to inform you of your admission to The George Washington University Law School as a candidate for the Juris Doctor degree beginning next fall semester.
Yay yay! That probably puts GW at the top of the list right now, primarily because it's in DC and I think I'm going to prefer DC over Boston, but also because I think the curriculum GW offers (and the connections I'll be able to make there) will be more beneficial in the long run. GW also tops the list so far in the amount and quality of financial aid information included in their acceptance letter/package (medium size manilla envelope). For example, I learned that
Previously I'd heard the aggregate max was something like $65k, so this is great news. I also learned that commercial loans have aggregate limits (no surprise there) ranging from $102k to $150k. So it sounds like fools like me should be able to find a total of something like $250k in educational loans for law school. Doesn't it sound beautiful to be so deliciously deep in debt?
Right. But I've found something to give that debt some context. I've been rereading Fast Food Nation for purposes of a class I'm teaching, and there I've been reminded that many careers must begin with massive debt. For example, an owner of a pizza franchise profiled in the book has to borrow $200k before he'd sold a single pizza. It only took the franchisee three years to pay off that debt, and that's probably a lot fewer years than it'll take me to pay off mine, but still, he started in a similarly-sized hole and pulled out. Another example is Idaho potato farmer. According to Schlosser,
So, see, lawyers aren't the only people insane enough to borrow huge sums of money on the promise that they'll make it all back sometime soon. It's still insane, but clearly there's plenty of this insanity going around.
Posted 10:35 AM | Comments (3) | law school
Non-Violence is More Difficult
As "anti-war" protesters gather in cities around the world, Jason Rylander agrees with Jeremy Hurewitz that the anti-war left has failed to offer alternatives in the face of threats to peace. Hurewitz makes some good points, and he's right that progressives desperately need quality leaders with coherent, concrete, and comprehensive plans for addressing the complex problems we face today. While Hurewitz offers no evidence for one of his central claims—that the left has praised U.N. sanctions against Iraq (where? when? who?)—the fact that he can make the claim shows the desperate need for expanding the agenda: Progressives shouldn't think of themselves as "anti-war" or "anti-American" [1], but as "pro-peace" or simply "strident activists for non-violent conflict resolution." But see, there it is: Nonviolence seems complicated. It doesn't fit well into nice little soundbites and conceptual bon-bons. Well, actually it does, but those bon-bons have been poisoned by a cultural narrative that dismisses as "flower power" and "hippy dippy" the idea that non-violent solutions can effectively address the world's problems. When we're confronted with a situation like that in Iraq, we want a concrete solution. What should we do? That's where violence has a lot of appeal—it's simple. What do we do? We bomb them; problem solved via elimination. Of course, what the "anti-war" people are saying is that it's never that simple. Massive bombing of Iraq might end Hussein's regime, but it won't end the problems in the region or the world. So what should we do instead of bombing and killing and violence and physical, material force? Well, we could start by returning again to Ghandi's eight rules for making nonviolence work. To me this would mean we should:- Vigorously support robust inspections. No violence involved.
- Flood Iraq with humanitarian aid: food, water, medical supplies and personnel. Withdraw our troops immediately and instead of spending millions (perhaps billions) massing troops on Iraq's borders, we should start spending that money building hospitals and distribution networks for food and other material goods in Iraq. Think about that for a minute. What do you think would happen? Could Saddam Hussein remain in power if he tried to prevent these humanitarian measures? Probably not. And what this food and medicine (and perhaps education) would give Iraq is a healthy, thinking population with a sense of possibility and an ability to work for its own improvement. Plus, this strategy would answer the critics who say the anti-war movement seems oblivious to the continued suffering of the Iraqi people. (Again, I think this charge is completely unfounded, but the perception exists, so it's a good idea for the left to actively counter it.)
- Immediately stop humiliating and making fun of the U.N. and our allies in Europe. Go to them with hats in hand, apologize, and make genuine efforts to regain their trust and to work with them to douse the flames of the violent rhetoric we've been spouting.
- Ask the U.N. to create an international panel of experts—politicians, historians, academics, intelligence people, etc—to identify the situations, events, and policies that motivate terrorism around the world, and to suggest strategies for changing or eliminating those situations, events, and policies to reduce or eliminate terrorism. Call this panel something like the International Terrorism Council (ITC). Currently the "war on terror" is a "war" being run by Bush and Co., "terror" is whatever Bush and Co. says it is, and the methods of this "war" are to kill, crush, and imprison suspects. This is a little like putting band-aids on skin lesions that are really being caused by a cancer that you don't even try to treat. The ITC would diagnose and treat the cancer, eliminating the need for all those bloody band-aids.
Of course, who am I to make these suggestions? I'm just some guy. But here's the thing: If we're going to demand alternatives, we have to be willing to consider them, to discuss them, to have good reasons for rejecting them or for preferring other alternatives. Taking non-violent, humble, cooperative foreign policy seriously in the U.S. is difficult for most Americans to do because there's such a powerful set of forces massed against it.
It's easy to find reasons to go with the flow, or at least not to actively obstruct its progress. It's easy to take issue with A.N.S.W.E.R. because you disagree with the views of some of its members. And it's easy to think that violence and physical force will solve our problems. These things are easy because the are simple and because many elected and otherwise prominent people are constantly tell us to do them. What's hard is to face the fact that we face complex problems without simple solutions. It's hard to have the courage to stand up to dominant cultural narratives and to take seriously alternatives that you're constantly encouraged to dismiss. We have to stop taking these easy routes and choose instead to take the higher road.
Footnote: [1] All the progressives I know are also the most patriotic people I know. This "anti-American" business is a ludicrous charge on its face. What does it mean? Why would people who are against "America" go freeze in the cold to protest policies they fear will only hurt America in the long run? Like those crazy kids over at Buzzflash argue, a strike against Saddam Hussein is a gift to Al Qaeda since it will only create more hatred for and resistance to American global hegemony. So people who say "no war" are saying "Save America," even when they don't have a concrete, step-by-step program for doing so.
Posted 10:13 AM | general politics
Media Failures
I'm playing catch-up, but really, any time's a good time to point out media failures. Media failures are examples of the media failing in its duty to keep even those of us who work hard to pay attention informed of important events. For example, there was the news last week that the "dossier" U.K. Prime Minister Tony Blair presented to make the case for war on Iraq—and which U.S. Secretary of State Colin Powell cited and praised in his speech to the U.N.— was at least partly a work of plagiarism. Yes, some media outlets covered the story, quietly and briefly, and somehow people seem to have heard about it, but I didn't see this news on front pages or leading nightly news broadcasts, which I would say is a failure. The two most vehement supporters of war base their arguments on publicly-available information, some of which is years old, and that's not a top story? Blair's and Powell's reliance on such information shows they have no "secret intelligence" they're not sharing; if they had anything better, they would have trotted it out—and that's not a top story?
Recent Media Failure #2: Where is the news about the resolutions in both the House and Senate to require President Bush to get Congressional authorization before using force in Iraq? See more at Ruminate This (which also leads to the interesting Stand Down, the "no war" blog. Originally spotted via Testify!.) This story dovetails nicely with one that thankfully is getting a good amount of coverage: the lawsuit against President Bush that charges he doesn't have the authority to commit troops in battle w/out an explicit declaration of war from Congress. Long shot? Yes. Worth it? Definitely.
Finally, Newsweek gives the full story, I'll give you the highlights: When MoveOn.org recently asked its email recipients to donate money for pro-peace advertising, people responded; MoveOn.org collected more than $75,000 in less than two hours. However, Viacom Outdoor CEO Wally Kelly made a personal decision not to run the ads. Viacom's PR people quickly conjured up some obscure guidelines to cover this capricious decision, but media buyers said they'd never heard of those guidelines. MoveOn.org and other pro-peace groups were not happy.
But after receiving hundreds of calls and emails in protest of this decision, Viacom reversed itself with the following statement:
While it's great that Viacom has deigned to run the ads, the "misunderstanding" definitely remains. A major part of the misunderstanding here is how (unelected) one person can make a decision about freedom of expression in the U.S. that shuts down speech in major cities all over the country. This and all similar failures of "freedom of the press" in the U.S. are products of media conglomeration: too few companies (about 10) own nearly all media outlets in the U.S. See The Big Ten to get a peek at how deep the rabbit hole goes, and read Rich Media, Poor Democracy for something more like a full story of how media conglomeration shapes our political landscape, limits the range of debate on nearly every issue, and thereby limits the possibility that the world might one day be a better place for us all.
Posted 08:00 AM | general politics
When Law School Sucks
Nikki, Esq. has hit a low low on the road to becoming a lawyer, the low point which I'm currently most afraid of facing myself all too soon: drowning in debt, hating what I'm doing, and trapped doing it because of said debt. The advice from Bill Alltreuter in Nikki's comments are helpful, and I hope he's right. The trouble with big life decisions like this is you just can never be sure. Is X better than Y? There's no way to know until you're in the middle of it. And even then, it's hard to know because once you're through the middle, on the back side somewhere, things can look different yet again. In optimistic mode, that's probably what makes life fun. In pessimistic mode, it just sucks.
Posted 09:57 AM | Comments (1) | law school
