Abortion, Gun nuttery, Voting rights
I am revising again my revised list of issues the Democrats have failed to deal with:
- Abortion
- Climate crisis
Evictions(rental assistance money seems finally to be being distributed, easing this threat[1])- Gun nuttery
- Health care
- Infrastructure (specifically, the
$3.5sub-$2 trillion reconciliation package, now dubbed Build Back Better) - Minimum wage
- Unemployment
- Voting rights
- White supremacist gangs (police)
The new entry is gun nuttery.
Ruth Marcus warns that, with a majority of six, conservatives on the Supreme Court are likely to lose patience with an incremental approach toward issues such as abortion, gun nuttery, and voting rights. The only visible restraint will be midterm elections; if the Court moves too rapidly,[2] voter backlash may deliver the Democrats a reprieve from their own failure to deliver.
Ruth Marcus, “The Rule of Six: A newly radicalized Supreme Court is poised to reshape the nation,” Washington Post, November 28, 2021, https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2021/11/28/supreme-court-decisions-abortion-guns-religious-freedom-loom/
Academia
Make no mistake: I desperately want to work in academia, but as an academic. This article, while reflective of the larger pressures affecting academia under neoliberal ideology and conservative backlash, is mostly about staff positions,[3] from which there is absolutely no path for advancement to a faculty position such as I would be interested in.
The apartheid within academia, here between staff people and academics, is even more stark than in society generally. Staff people are the help, the servants, hired to keep the mechanics of an institution working, but not really to advance its mission. The department secretary—in my experience, always a woman—for example, is crucial for navigating academic bureaucracy and sometimes the hierarchy; the latter, for example, in the case of a Master’s student whose long-delayed graduation (even longer than mine) was unlikely to be signed off on by the department chair. The secretary waited for the chair to be absent before including that student’s paperwork with others for the dean, who utterly unaware of and unconcerned by the ideological differences that prejudiced that student, to sign off. (This secretary told me she did this with another student’s paperwork; she did not tell me, but I suspect she may have done the same with mine.)
The intellectual discussions I crave are held among faculty, especially tenured faculty, and to a diminished degree with students, never with staff, and it is unlikely, at 62 years of age, I could progress from a staff position to a sufficiently high administrative rank as to once again join in those conversations. It would be worse than the exile I now suffer.
Kevin R. McClure, “Colleges Are Hiring. But Do People Want to Work There?” Chronicle of Higher Education, November 22, 2021, https://www.chronicle.com/article/colleges-are-hiring-but-do-people-want-to-work-there
Work
Jay Greene, “Labor board calls for revote at Amazon warehouse in Alabama in major victory for union,” Washington Post, November 29, 2021, https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2021/11/29/amazon-warehouse-union-revote/
- [1]Chris Arnold, “Evictions rising even as rental help from Congress reaches millions of people,” National Public Radio, November 11, 2021, https://www.npr.org/2021/11/11/1053540080/evictions-rising-even-as-rental-help-from-congress-reaches-millions-of-people↩
- [2]Ruth Marcus, “The Rule of Six: A newly radicalized Supreme Court is poised to reshape the nation,” Washington Post, November 28, 2021, https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2021/11/28/supreme-court-decisions-abortion-guns-religious-freedom-loom/↩
- [3]Kevin R. McClure, “Colleges Are Hiring. But Do People Want to Work There?” Chronicle of Higher Education, November 22, 2021, https://www.chronicle.com/article/colleges-are-hiring-but-do-people-want-to-work-there↩